Praying and Running

Training for the Carmel Marathon on April 4th, 2020 in Carmel Indiana Goal: 2:51 Week 2 Runs: 8 Weekly Milage: 72 Cumulative Milage: 139 Workouts / Long Run: 17 with 8 at Marathon Pace Performance Management Chart for the week showing my running fitness progression from the beginning of the cycle through the current week. The main focus this week was just building my milage a little from last week, about 5 more miles, while being ready for my first MP workout. I am pretty focused right now and I struggled some last week with wanting to do more that the plan called for. I really wanted to add in a threshold workout. Marathon training is about discipline and long term thinking though. I could have added in some threshold miles and it probably would have been ok but doing the plan the way the plan is written will get me where I want to go and will keep me feeling on track and help me from wavering in the other direction as well. I'm doing the plan, period. I ran my fi...

April 4th 2020 Carmel Indiana Goal: 2:51 This Week's Training Runs: 7 Milage: 67 Workouts: 4 mile threshold (6:20 --> 6:04) Long Run: 17 miles with a fast finish Week 1 for the 2020 Carmel Marathon is in the books, so to speak. My primary goals for this week were just to get back into the training groove and get a decent amount of milage in while getting back to the 7 day a week running thing. Honestly, it feels like I just raced a marathon about a month ago...... The biggest challenge this week was probably the 7 day a week running. I haven't run on Sunday in about 5 weeks and I kind of got used to having a day off. But days off don't help you run fast marathons, at least they don't help me run fast marathons. The other challenge this week was the threshold run. With the short turn around I was a little afraid that I wouldn't do very well. I really didn't feel like I needed to knock that workout out of the park but I also didn't want t...

On November 9th, 2019 I ran the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon (IMM). The short report is that I whined a lot during the build up and incessantly complained that I had gotten fat and slow but on race day, a semblance of my old self showed up and ran 1 hell of a race crushing my stated goal of 2:57 by nearly 4 minutes. The long report follows. I really had kind of given up on ever running a fast marathon again. After my back issues last year I just never got going full steam again. Instead I had gotten fat and slow because I let my diet slide and put on about 15 pounds and I was trying to run without fully committing to the work of marathon training. This summer I had decided to just maybe, kind of run the IMM for fun and not really lose my summer to training for it. But then Chad, a friend of mine who runs with a group on Sundays that I sometimes go to, asked my if I wanted to do my long runs for IMM together. I reluctantly agreed. Chad and I put up a couple of solid long...