Praying and Running

Is it just me or does this not sound like a way to have a really fun week? This Sunday 9/22/2013 I will be running a "Marathon as a Training Run." I am currently in training for the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon which I will race on 11/2/2013. During my last training cycle I incorporated a few training runs over the standard 20 - 24 mile "longest run in a training program" runs. Most programs cap the long run here because it is thought firstly that a run longer provides very little more in the way of preparation and increases the chance of injury past an acceptable point and secondly because the runner could loose valuable days to the additional recovery needed from such an effort. My last time around though I found that I could do some longer runs pushing my body to be better adapted to the specific distance of the marathon and I could do them in a way that minimized injury risk and recovery time. I blogged about it back then here . My plan was to do the sam...

17 weeks. 1142 Mile. 146 hours of running. 95,135 calories. One 30 mile run and 9 runs of 20 miles or more. Average pace 7:41. 25 hours of strength training. This sums up the work I put in for the 26.2 miles I ran at the 2013 Carmel Marathon on April 20th. Friday on my lunch hour I drove to the Monon Center in Carmel IN for packet pickup. Not much to say about this except that trying to squeeze it into a long lunch resulted in undue stress. Also this didn't allow me  time to stick around and explore. But in the end I guess that's OK. Friday evening we headed out for some serious carb loading. With the taper and my efforts to load up on carbs over a 3 day period, I wasn't really hungry but I ate that pasta like a trooper anyway knowing that I would need it in about 12 hours. Sleep Friday night was spare. A sick dog and a wife finishing up her last semester for a Bachelors degree kept the house hopping until about 11:30. No problem, if you follow my training on dailymile  y...

The first phase of training for the Carmel 2013 Marathon is complete. This phase is called the endurance phase and lead me through a build up in mileage from running 55 to 80 miles in a week. I am now in the last few days of a recovery week where my mileage and intensity is purposefully cut so that my body can respond to the stimulus provided and make the adaptations needed to allow me to run more with less fatigue. This will be valuable in the next phase as I will increase the intensity of running while maintaining and even increasing the distance in order to teach my body run further, faster. In looking back at this period of training which began on 12/23/2012 I have logged about 350 miles at an average pace of 7:41 / mile for a total of over 41 hours of running. My average distance is about 8 miles per run with the longest run being 21.1 miles. The average of 8 miles per run doesn't really tell the story though as the runs tend to be either 12 - 15 miles or 5 miles. About once...

I have known for sometime that in order for me to race my best I need to have training runs longer than the race I am preparing for and this is not unique to me. Most people who want to compete in a race from the 5k to the half-marathon are aware of this and train like this. When I stepped into the world of marathoning however, I found that conventional wisdom and nearly all training plans have long runs capped anywhere from 16 to 22 miles with 20 being the common longest long run. I was uncomfortable with this during my first training cycle for the 2012 Indianapolis Monumental Marathon but "they" all said that going longer than that wouldn't produce any benefit that would out way the negatives. "They" all said a run any longer would carry with it great risk of injury and would require too much recovery time. I am a big believer in knowing your body and understanding what it is capable of rather than letting conventional wisdom dictate your limits. For that re...