Last week my training plan called for 45 miles, with a 20-mile long run on the weekend to cap things off. I was in Baltimore, so I covered my old loop around the Inner Harbor and eked out the extra miles with a few laps around Fort McHenry. For someone trying to run a 3-hour marathon by the end of the year, it was not a particularly promising effort – 20 miles in 2 hours and 45 minutes.
But that’s how long runs go, and sometimes stiff legs, a 10-degree change in weather and a distracted mind leads to something less than I would have hoped heading into Saturday. It was a weekend to visit family, and so simply getting in a long run between festivities was enough to be happy with.
The last run I trained for was my aborted hundred miler last summer, and it feels good to be back in a schedule. Last year, my training culminated in a fifty miles across a single weekend, as opposed to fifty miles in a whole week, and I’m loving the moderation this time around. Any more volume and running would start taking up too much time and space in my life.
Like with any training schedule, though, I have to stay flexible. Now that I’m going back into the office on a bit more regular of a schedule, I need to make room for shifted mid-week runs and changes in distance on a given day. You can see from my training schedule (and cut-out picture of my hero and drill sergeant, David Goggins) that I’ve made a lot of tweaks along the way, from extended Friday morning runs to shortened Tuesday – Thursday outings.
Physical flexibility is important as well, and I’m struggling to strike a good balance between training and staying limber. I hurt my back once back in January, and again a few weeks ago, and feel very much like a ticking time bomb. It doesn’t help that I’m at a desk all day and bending over in strange ways to play with Toby. I have to make an effort to stretch.
That’s that. It’s taking some time to get used to these training updates again, but it’s nice to sit down and write about how things are going.