Marathon Training - Week 10

This week has been a week of decisions.

There's a fine line between running to your best ability without a) causing yourself an injury and b) running becoming a chore rather than something enjoyable. This week I felt my training schedule was coming close to ticking both boxes.

On Tuesday I was due to run some intervals but didn't feel right as I left the house at 6am. My hip was still hurting from the long run on Sunday and I didn't feel right in the head. It had all the hallmarks of over training. I ran about half a mile down the road and stopped. I sat on a wall and thought about what I was trying to do. My plan has been to run a marathon in under 3 hours 30 minutes. I wondered if this was a step too far considering that my previous best was 3 hours 44 minutes and that I had been injured only a couple of months ago. So, I cancelled my session for the day and decided to re-think my goal.

I decided that I would reset my objective for the marathon and would aim for sub 3 hour 45 minutes with the intention of beating my previous personal best. So I uploaded a new training schedule into my Garmin watch. This schedule was still based on pace rather than heart rate and the biggest difference I noticed was that although the training schedule required the same distances to be run the pace that they were to be run at was significantly slower.

New schedule in hand I started the training on Wednesday morning. This was a 9 mile run at a slow pace. I was much happier with the new schedule as it took some pressure off me. That was until I finished the run and realised that I had paced it at exactly the same pace as before I had changed schedules. Basically I could have run the same run using the old schedule and probably would have thought that it was tough but just because I had changed to an "easier" training schedule I enjoyed the run even though both would have been run at the same pace. This made me think that it was all psychological and hatched another plan.

This time I decided to revert to the 3 hour 30 minute schedule but instead of training by pace I am going to train by heart rate. This means that no matter how I feel my pace will be limited by how well my heart is pumping. As I improve then my pace will improve although my heart rate will stay the same. That is this week's plan anyway! With only six weeks to go until the marathon I haven't got time to be messing about with the schedule.

Staying over at friends for a barbecue on Saturday evening meant that I had to run my long run on the Saturday morning rather than the Sunday. It was meant to be a half marathon race but I couldn't find one locally being run on the Saturday morning so I had to go out on my own and just knock out a fast half marathon time. I managed to go sub 1 hour 40 minutes which I am pleased with and I think that under race conditions I could have gone up to 5 minutes quicker. That's what I like to think, the truth may be somewhat less. Here's the Garmin link to the half marathon.



This week I have to run another 20 mile long run. I will be running this on a Friday because I am away for a friend's 40th birthday weekend. I am hoping it doesn't go as badly as the last 20 miler that I did!