Catchy Monkey

Slowly, slowly and all that.

It's strange how a few weeks ago an 11 mile run in the morning would just be ticked off the list with hardly a thought and yet now I find going out for a 5 mile recovery run pretty exhausting. This is why getting back to "normal" after a marathon is a slow process.

The nice thing about this period of time post race is that none of my runs take that long. I don't have to get up before the dawn chorus, not even on my long run on a Sunday. This weekend will be a 9 mile slow run which will take me less than 1 hour 20 minutes. Barely time to listen to a decent-lengthed podcast.

I've been reading the Hansons Marathon Method book that arrived last week. At the moment I am three quarters of the way through it and I have been convinced that this will be the schedule I will follow for the Manchester marathon in April. I know it's a bit of an experiment since it goes against the grain of normal marathon training so in case it doesn't work I will fall back on the P+D 55-70 mile schedule (minus the double day runs) for Chester next October. We are barely out of this October and I already have to plan for next October! Such is the life of a marathon runner.

Hopefully this new schedule will work and I'll finally get under the magical 3:30 barrier. I will train for a 3:25 marathon (which my half marathon and 10k PBs suggest is achievable) but will run on the day at 3:30 pace to give myself some wiggle room. That's the plan anyway.

My new heart rate strap has arrived and is not causing me any issues at all. My Garmin heart rate monitor snapped onto it with no problems and it appears to be giving accurate readings. Most importantly it is not giving me a rash on my body like the old one. As I said in the previous blog I will be training for the next marathon by pace but it will be good to know that my heart rate isn't being pushed out of the zones it should be in. There's little worse than overtraining for a big race.

I'm roughly halfway through the recovery schedule, only another two and a half weeks of slow running. Then it's base training for three weeks which means more slow running but bigger distances and then marathon training starts. It sounds counter intuitive but I'm looking forward to the variety that marathon training gives, plus I love to follow a plan. Tell me how far and how often and I am a happy bunny.