Saturday, September 10, 2011

Day 29 (9/9): 3 miles / 30:03

Great day!  Great run!

For no particular reason at all, today seemed to be a great day.  After a productive day at work, today's run was a great way to start my evening.

I spent a little time today putting together a training calendar for myself.  I've decided to use Hal Higdon's marathon training program (http://www.halhigdon.com/) which is 18 weeks long.  This will cover January 16th through May 20th - Marathon Day.  What I needed was something to get me from now through January 16th.  http://www.marathontraining.com/marathon/marathon.html offers a 19 week training schedule meant to build up your mileage and prepare you for the difficult marathon training schedule.  And, what do you know, it's 18 and a half weeks from now until January 16th.  It is said that, if you finish those 19 weeks without injury, you should be ready to begin the marathon training program.

Today begins day 1 of my training schedule (I'm technically starting the 19 week program 4 days late, but who's counting).  The mileage buildup program takes you from 3 miles to 10, so, fortunately for me, today's run was only 3, which I'm proud to say I'm feeling quite comfortable with.  I've also read that you should be doing most of your runs at your marathon pace.  Of course, having never run a marathon before, I have no idea what my marathon pace might be.  I've decided to shoot for a 10 minute mile and, needless to say, I've managed to settle into that pace nicely.  I assume the philosophy is that, if you train at your marathon pace, as you add miles to your runs, you're not doing so at a slower speed, which means months of training at exactly the same pace.  By marathon day you should be so used to that pace that it should be a lot easier to complete without drastic changes in speed.  I guess we'll just have to see about that.  A ten minute mile for a marathon would mean a total time of 4 hours 22 minutes.  It'll be interesting to see how close I am to that in 8+ months.

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