Week 15 of marathon training, in review

So here’s how my week of training has been:

Monday — Labor day. Glorious, glorious holiday. I rode my bike 30 lovely miles with Jen, to her house, around Sabattus Pond, and back.

Tuesday — Track club, for the second week in a row cut one rep short because of my car-free situation. 1.5 miles to the track, 800s at 10K pace and 1.5 miles back cool-down for a 6-mile day.

Wednesday — I had the alarm set for 6 a.m., but when I woke up, I thought to check the training plan to see how many miles I actually had to run. Oh, only 5? The 8-mile mid-week runs are over? JOY, I THINK I’LL SLEEP ANOTHER 30 MINUTES. On my run, I passed a lot of kids walking to the high school and I felt a little nostalgic for those days …

Thursday — Rain. Rain. Rain. 5 miles in the rain. Cruelly, it stopped just as I was finishing.

I ran every run this week without a heart rate monitor, GPS watch, music or audio book. I think the runs might have felt easier that way.

Friday — Rest. Glorious, glorious rest. I walked to work and that was my only exercise. Later that night I went to the planning party for my Reach the Beach relay team and had a little more fuel stoked on my Iron-Man-dreams fire.

Saturday — I got a notice from the library that my book came in! 😀

Me: “Tony, want to go for a walk with the dogs to get my library book?”

Tony: ” …. No?”

Me: “Your loss.”

Scoop, while we stopped in the park to read the prologue. He tried to quit our walk after the first half mile … tsk tsk tsk.

Tomorrow — The inaugural Lake Auburn Half Marathon!

I have 20 miles on the marathon training schedule, and the way I see it, I have three options:

1. Run 7 miles before the half. Run the half like a training run.
2. Run the half as best I feel tomorrow. Run another 7 miles sometime later.
3. Race the half hard.

I feel like I could race 13 miles and be blown out for weeks (that was how I felt  after my PR at Race the Runways this April) and I could run 20 easy miles and be fine to run another hard workout the next day. The past several weeks of training have just felt that good.

On the flip side, it’s another opportunity to practice an endurance race and I have felt that good this summer. I have another half-marathon PR around the corner, I know it …

Maybe this logic sounds silly, but I think I am better off running the extra distance so that I will be better rested for my races in the next few weeks.

The most important thing to me now is running my two marathons in two weeks. The half-marathon PR would be nice, but it wouldn’t be as nice as finishing the MDI Marathon strong.

So there it is.

5 a.m. wake-up call tomorrow. Wish me luck. 🙂

 

 

 

Pattie Reaves

About Pattie Reaves

I'm a new mom and renegade fitness blogger at After the Couch. I live in Brewer with my husband, Tony, our daughter Felicity, and our two pugs, Georgia and Scoop.