694.54 Miles to Go

End of week one - only 15 more weeks and one marathon to go before Cologne! During the course of the 16 week training plan, not including the Gay Games Marathon itself, I will have ran 742 miles in preparation for the run. Having run 47.46 miles during week one – 7 hours and 17 minutes at an average pace of 9:13, I only have 694.54 miles left to train between now and August 8th! It’s going to be a long 15 weeks between now and then with many miles to cover. My two shortest mileage weeks are the weeks leading up to the marathons themselves (the long awaited taper). In the week before the Capitol City Marathon in Olympia I’ll taper down to 25 miles and in the week leading up to Cologne I’ll be as low as 22 miles. My highest mile week will be week 11 when I will put in 65 miles in a 5 day period – I’ll average just over 46 miles per week over the 16 week period.

It takes a lot of time to cover this many miles. My current plan has me running 5 days per week. That’s a lot of hours on your feet pounding the pavement. I’ve tried various plans over the years – 3 day a week running (not enough for me) 4 day a week plans and for New York, I was running 6 days per week. This time I thought I see if 5 is the perfect number!

So far so good – am I sore? Yes, I’ve constantly got one ache, pain or little nagging issue but in the end my legs feel strong. The last 6 weeks of low intensity but consistent running has really paid off. The schedule for week was as follows:

Sunday – 19 mile long run
Monday – Rest
Tuesday – 7.04 mile negative split
Wednesday – 7.13 mile recovery/easy run
Thursday – 6.07 mile speed work
Friday – 8.0 mile hills
Saturday – Rest

I think the biggest two challenges this week have been adjusting to a new schedule and tracking my food intake. I prefer to run in the morning before work - once the day is over I’ve little energy to run. In order to do this I have to get up at 4:50 each morning to catch the earliest bus to town, get my run in and be ready to work between 7-8 am. The other challenge is (believe it or not) eating enough food in the correct combination.  I burn about 100 calories per mile running. This means that on a 20 mile run I’ve burned 2000 calories! Between these and my base calories I’ve got to consume 4000 or so calories that day to maintain my weight. Needless to say I always loose a few pounds during heavy training. Like I mentioned I use a program called Edibles to track my food intake (basically an electronic food journal) and track my activities.  You enter in your food eaten and amount of exercise and it calculates your caloric needs. It’s pretty handy.

Week two – here I come!  Off for a simple 16 mile run!

Later -

Jim