Well my base building phase is officially over, and on Monday, I dove into Marine Corps Marathon training marathon training full force.

I spent the week I was on vacation reviewing a ton of different training plans, looking at my calendar for the next several months and crafting a plan that would work in my schedule.

Training for fall marathons is always a little bit tricky for me because long runs tend to conflict with either football tailgate days or my flag football league.



So this year, to prevent too much schedule clashing, I built a plan that has a ton of flexibility for long runs. Depending on the week, I will be tackling my long runs on either Friday, Saturday, Sunday or in more rare cases, Monday.

Going with the theme of flexibility, there are several days where I have shorter easier, runs scheduled. I plan to do the majority of those runs, but if there's a time I'm starting to feel some burn out or can just tell that my legs need a break, those workouts will be swapped for cross-training -- either biking or hitting the pool.



If you're curious, you can take a closer look at my training plan.

I'm only a few days into training, but it's been going well so far. Or at least it was until I ran into a minor blister issue.



I'm not sure where this bad boy came from, but I think I got some dirt in my shoe at softball on Monday that rubbed the wrong way. I tried to run yesterday morning, but even putting my foot in my sneaker hurt because my toes were squeezed together.

I've got some blister pads on it now that I'm hoping will take care of the problem. I'm heading to a bootcamp class this morning led by Army soldiers and I'm hoping I can get through the class without too many issues.

It should be a fun training cycle, and I'm so looking forward to finally running MCM!

 

I'm happy to say that my fall race calendar is starting to shape up very nicely.

The Marine Corps Marathon is my A race for the fall, and I've built the rest of my race schedule to support that.


Right now I have a two other half marathons on the calendar that I plan to use as long runs.

A 20-miler seems so much more fun if 13.1 of those miles are run on a supported course with other people and only 6.9 miles are run alone either before or after the race.

The first half marathon I'm running this fall is the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Half Marathon in early October. This is a local race that I ran last year when I was completely untrained and I had a total blast and set a huge PR.


I'm not planning to PR on the course this year, but since it was such a fun race, I knew I wanted to run it again.

The race falls on the same weekend that I have to do a 16-miler, so my plan is to run a three-mile warm up before the race and then run the race before heading to my flag football game.

The second half marathon on my schedule for this fall is the Baltimore Half, two weeks before MCM.


That weekend I'm scheduled to run 20-22 miles. The Baltimore half doesn't start until 9:45, so my plan is to get up early, run 7-9 miles and then start the race. By the time I cross the finish line that afternoon, I'll have at least 20 miles in the books.

Baltimore is a notoriously hilly city, so I'm not worried about pushing too hard or too fast in the race. My plan is to take it nice and easy, enjoy the aid stations and use the cheering crowds to push through the last few miles of my long run.


I'm looking forward to breaking up some of my long runs with races. I'm definitely not planning to race for all of my long runs, but I think having some races planned helps break up the monotony of a training cycle.

Plus, mentally, running a half + six miles seems so much easier than running one beast of a 20-miler.

For me, marathon training is all about the mental games. The runs are long and hard, but breaking them up with races makes it seem more manageable.

Do you ever break up your long training runs by throwing in some races and tacking on the extra miles?

It's rare you get two posts from me in one day, but I'm in a pickle and need some running advice.

Remember last week when I was super gung ho about deciding which marathon to run this fall? You all gave me some awesome advice and I was 99% sure I was going to register for the Marine Corp Marathon and decide about Baltimore later, maybe even doing both to achieve Maniac status.

But now I'm having a freak out.

Do I realllllly want to run a marathon this fall?

Do I reallllly want to sacrifice my summer weekends to fit in super long runs (17, 18, 19, 20 milers).

Or would I rather spend my summer training for half marathons? My favorite distance. Manageable long runs that don't require the death of my social life. Nothing longer than two hours. The ability to still be able to walk after finishing a training run.

Or do I want to push myself to tackle 26.2 again? No doubt 26.2 is an awesome challenge.

But so is 13.1. It's not as much of a challenge as it used to be to do the distance, but now I can focus on improving times and having fun.

Running for me has always been about having fun. I'm not fast so I'm not running to win anything. I'm running for the experience. For the joy of accomplishing something challenging, and yea, maybe a little bit for the sweet race bling.

My college roomie gave me some good advice. She said:

Above all you always tell me running should be fun so if it fills you with dread that is bad. However if you think this is just a momentary setback and tomorrow you will feel differently then that is ok!

Right now, I don't know if I'm dreading the thought that MCM registration is tomorrow or if this is just a blip. Either way, I have to decide what to do. I don't want running to feel like a burden this summer. I want it to be fun like always, but at the same time, I'm grappling with all kinds of "do I want to challenge myself to do this and push myself for this goal" issues.

Issues that I need to sort out by tomorrow at noon. Help!

As I've started reading more and more people's blogs, recently I've stumbled onto a bunch of foodie blogs by following all your links. While I don't know that I will ever have the patience to take snapshots of everything I eat before eating it, I do know that by reading these blogs, I've become a lot more interested in food.

As a runner, I've always been concerned with my eating. I want to make sure I'm putting the right stuff in so that I can perform my best when I'm running. But when it comes to creativity in the kitchen, I'm seriously lacking. So I've started turning to these foodie blogs for healthy recipes ideas.

Last night I tried the Chick Pea stir fry recipe that I found on Oh She Glows. It was delicious and even the BF liked it and he is a self-proclaimed veggie hater. The only downside was buying all those fresh veggies jacked my grocery bill up a bunch.

In other healthy eating news, I made my own trail mix yesterday to bring to work for breakfast this week. It contains granola with sliced almonds, sunflower seeds, soy nuts, raisins and craisins. Pretty delicious.

I guess the point of this ramble is that I'm making it a goal of mine to try out new healthy food recipes. If I remember, maybe I'll snap some photos from time to time, but if nothing else I'll keep you posted on how my journey into more creative cooking goes.

-----

In other really awesome news, my roommate who works in the TV department at the Washington Post alerted me to a PBS show tonight about marathons. It'll be on at 8 p.m. and is only an hour long.

Here's the description from TV Guide:

Thirteen novices, ranging in age from 22 to 60, train nine months for the Boston Marathon. The group includes a former smoker, a heart-attack survivor and an overweight woman, and receives support from three-time Boston Marathon winner Uta Pippig and Donald Megerle, director of Tufts' annual President's Marathon Challenge. Included: comments from Timothy Noakes, a University of Cape Town sports-medicine expert; and Harvard bioanthropologist Daniel Lieberman.

I'm going to try to catch it even though it conflicts with the Biggest Loser. I can watch the second hour of BL and I'm sure figure out what I missed.

Well it's official. I dropped down to the half marathon from the full this morning. I can barely walk this morning my knee hurts so much. I tried to go out for a run Sunday while the weather was gorgeous. I got maybe a quarter of a mile before I had to stop and walk back home. It was disheartening to the say the least.

I guess it's back to rest and ice and stretching out my freakin' IT Band.

I'm trying to keep my chin up. I love half marathons. They are such a fun distance and it will be my first race ever in D.C. and my friends can still come watch. I'm just nervous my knee won't heal up in time for me to get some quality runs in before race day. I don't want to DNS or DNF this race.

I'm bummed but OK with dropping from the full to the half, but I would be heart broken if I couldn't run at all.

My Terps are soccer national champions and I am super freakin' excited about it. I was thisclose to buying a plane ticket to Texas after we beat St. John's in the semifinals Friday night, but the cheapest I could find was about $350 and I'm a little too poor to be able to drop $350 bucks like that. So needless to say I had to watch it on TV, which was a huge let down. After we won all I wanted to do was go jump into the arms of my two friends on the team and give them the world's biggest hugs ever. But we won and I'm so excited!!!!

Tuesday night I ran a solid six miler in 1:02 or 1:03ish. I felt tired before I headed out and the first three miles felt hard, but after the turn around I felt better. Maybe it was just the mental thing knowing that I was on the way back that let me pick up my pace in the second half of the run.

The first three miles I hit all my splits at almost exactly 11 minute miles. By if you'll notice from my finish time, I must have picked it up a bit on the way back in to finish with that time.

I stretched really well after I got home, but still woke up sore the next morning. (Not like super painful sore, but my legs felt really heavy walking to and from the Metro.)

Because of that I skipped my Wednesday scheduled three miler. I just wanted to relax my legs. I had thought about maybe rescheduling it for yesterday (my normally schedule rest day) but I didn't want to run three days in a row with a pace run tonight and a long run tomorrow. So no running for me.

Tonight I have another six miler at pace and this weekend I've got 11 on the schedule. I'm a little nervous about the 11. I haven't run that kind of distance in a long, long time.

Well it's about time I catch up with my blogging a few minutes before I head out to lunch.

As some of you may remember from wayyyy long ago when I last posted, marathon training started last week.

To recap:
Monday's run was crappy.
Tuesday's 5-miler was better
Wednesday's three-miler was pretty good.
Thursday rest.
Friday wa five at pace.

I wanted to my pace to be between 10:30 and 11 minute miles, with the idealist in me really really hoping to whip out some 10 minute miles. I don't remember the exact time, but I finished the five in 51:10ish I believe, which is just a little bit slower than 10 minute miles. Not too shabby.

My weekend long run was eight miles. I couldn't get it done on Saturday because I was packing and driving back to Maryland for our last home football game of the season (which we blew to FSU) so I planned to do it Sunday.

I ended up having to go to the leasing office for my new place on Sunday and had to wait by the phone for the rest of the day for a return call, which left me zero time to go running. I was kind of bummed because it was a gorgeous day for an 8-miler, but that's life and unfortunately making sure everything is squared away with the new townhouse is a priority.

I won't be getting my runs in this week either because my commute is about an hour each way until I can move to my real place and it's too dark before I leave and when I get back. For now I'm just crashing with friends in Annapolis until I can move.

I do have tentative plans to run a Turkey Trot 5K on Thursday though, so I won't feel like a complete slacker. (Ok that's a lie, I already feel like a complete slacker.)

I hope to get things back on track with the running soon, but I know I'm in a big transition right now and just need to take things one at a time until I get settled in. Missing a few runs probably won't kill my training.

Man I feel like I haven't had a second to catch my breath since this weekend. I've been filling in for one of my co-workers at work who's out for a family emergency and I've been trying to finish up all of my work that I need to finish by my last day on Friday.

Sorry I've been gone for so long peeps. It's been a busy few days. Here's a quick recap.

Monday: Crappy morning run (see previous post for details) and then ended up working a 12-hour day. Yikes it was long and made me really glad I worked out in the morning.

Tuesday: Had to cover an event in the morning so that meant I was back to my evening workouts. But it worked out perfectly for me because I had to take a half day because of the long day Monday and the early start on Tuesday. So I went grocery shopping, did laundry, caught up on two episodes of Lost, took a 20 minute power nap and then headed to the gym for an early cycling class. I was so tired I had thought about skipping the gym all together on Tuesday, but I ended up being really glad I went even though I wasn't a huge fan of the cycling instructor and her class format.

Wed: Back to my morning run on the thrillmill at the gym. Got in a solid 30 minutes, but kept the pace at 5.5 miles per hour because I didn't want to end up with shin splints again. It was a solid run.

Thursday: Today was a scheduled 25 minute easy run, but because Monday's run wasn't the best, I decided to push it a little bit this morning. I started out easy enough warming up with five minutes at 5 mph. Pushed it to 5.5 for the next five minutes and then kicked it up to 6 mph for the last 15.

Today's run was solid and left me feeling great. And that combine with reading this article from Active.com, inspired me to consider putting a full marathon on this year's race calendar. Originally I had four perspective halfs planned for this year with a few 5K's possible. But I don't know, I'm really toying with the idea of doing a full again.

I promised myself after my last one that I would take some time off (like a couple years) from the full because I was so sore afterwards and it took me a long time to recover because I got sick for the two weeks immediately after the race.

It's been about 1 year and 4 months now and I'm seriously considering doing it. I think I'm also being a bit competitive here because a friend of mine who's never run a marathon before is training for his first one, and I mean if he can do it, I think I can obviously do it again.

It's just a matter of whether or not I want to dedicate the time to it. It's something I have to think about.

On a whim last week, I registered for a marathon. That's right, me, who has only run 1 5K in her entire life, decided, "What the heck, why not run a marathon."

Ok, maybe it wasn't a complete whim. I've wanted to run a marathon for a really long time. (Or at least since I started snatching my mom's Runner's World Magazines before she could even read them, and got inspired).

The general idea of running a marathon probably planted itself in my brain about two or three years ago. I started training last summer to run the Disney World Marathon in Jan. 2006, but I seriously messed up my knee, and never really got back into training before I went back to school.

So that leaves me here. Nineteen years old, a sophomore in college, and training to run what has become my goal in life - 26.2 miles.

The night I so whimsically registered, I was sitting at my computer, browsing running websites, musing to myself that I really wanted to run a marathon and that I should train. Just musings, nothing serious. Until thinking outloud I told my roommate how much I really wanted to do this, and that the Baltimore Marathon was the perfect amount of time away.

Next thing I know, she's bouncing up and down saying how cool that would be and planning the sign she would make me for when I crossed the finish line (because I will cross the finish line, even if I end up crawling, which hopefully won't be the case).

I was still unsure and was definitely questioning whether I had it in me to actually do this. So I started checking Notre Dame's football schedule, looking for any excuse why this marathon wouldn't be the one. Because I watch every single Notre Dame football game, I figured a Saturday, in the prime of football season, wouldn't really work out.

But boy was I wrong. Notre Dame has a bye the day of the marathon. I took it as a sign, punched in my credit card number, and clicked register. And that is how I find myself where I am now - starting to run slowly and steadily, accumulating mileage.