7th Week of Marathon Training Recap

Last week was a little cray cray, in life and running.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Tuesday's speed workout was delayed to Wednesday morning.  I ended up not doing dual workouts on Wednesday, and thus opted to have 5 running days in a row.

What this meant was that I had early morning workouts on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Saturday was the Icebreaker Marathon Relay.

So that meant that yesterday, i was scheduled for an easy long run of 80 minutes.  I had already spent six hours away from the fam on Saturday for running, so I was reluctant to take more time away from them on Sunday, which is usually a rest day for me.

I could have gotten up early on Sunday morning.  My legs (and I) were tired from Saturday though so I opted to stay in bed (until 5:30 when the aforementioned children decided to wake up. AGHHHHHHHHH!).

Typically I do my runs during my son's afternoon nap.  However, it was raining and our house was a disaster so instead we cleaned and got some laundry done.

So that meant that I was headed to the treadmill after kids were in bed.   80 minutes on a treadmill.  BLAH.

I prepped for this by downloading all of the episodes of Modern Love, a podcast I was interested in listening to.  Each episode was about 20 minutes long so I used that to break up the 80 minute run into 4 segments.  I was going to try to go a bit faster with each segment so that mentally it seemed more managable.

The first segment was rough.  My legs were definitely sore/tired from the relay.  After the first segment, I was happy that they seemed to loosen up.  Mentally, the 2nd segment was the roughest for me.  I got through it by saying I could eat a Clif bar chomp at 40 minutes (which is 20 minutes earlier than I have been practicing eating gu on long runs, but in my mind treadmill long runs require a different strategy!).  After an hour, the treadmill auto shut off and I started it back up for the final 20 minute segment.  My legs felt good but also still tired.  My pace for this was definitely slow.  The plan was an "easy" 80 minutes and EH had down 10 miles in that time.  I accomplished 9.4.

GRATEFUL for a full on rest day today!

Total miles last week: 33.56
Total miles per plan: 35.75*

*I did not skip a workout last week, however, EH wanted me to get 10 miles of running logged each day of the weekend.  My Saturday mileage was only 8.16 due to shortened warm up and Sunday fell short by 0.6 miles.

Happy February!  January mileage total for me was 145.21 which I'm 99.99% sure is the most miles I have run in a month ever.  EVER.  WOOT WOOT!

11 more weeks until Boston!

Heard on the Run:
1. Modern Love podcast 1: "A Craigslist Missed Connection Lure"
I used to love reading those when i lived in Chicago so this was a great kickoff to segment 1 of my treadmill long run.

2. Modern Love podcast 2: "Just One Swirl Around the Bowl"
This was a beautiful piece, but I had a hard time focusing on it because I was wanting to stop running during segment 2.  I really enjoyed the author interviews after the piece was done being read though.

3. Modern Love podcast 3: "Open Adoption: Not So Simple Math"
I had tears in my eyes.  I was very tuned into this story which helped segment 3 fly by.

4.  Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast epidsode 37: "Obligers: Are You an Elizabeth?": 
I only got through less than half of this entire podcast because to be sure, I was not running a second longer than 80 minutes.  I have read all of Gretchen Rubin's books and am definitely an obliger so sort of wrote a blog post about that in my head while listening to this.  Will try to get to that later this week.