What We're Up To Next

Well, for one, we’re going to Minnesota in June.  Emily will be racing the US Half Marathon Championships, and I will be competing at Grandma’s Marathon (these are part of the same event; Grandma’s is hosting the Half Champs).  Since up until now I had been focused on the 5k and 10k in 2012, and Em had been focused pretty much only on the 5k, this means a dramatic shift in training.  Emily has so far just been cranking up her mileage into the upper 80s and hitting some basic workouts, while I’ve jumped into a series of longer runs/workouts.  Here’s what I’ve done so far:

3/31: 24 mile long run, with last 10 miles at about 6:10 pace.  I died hard on the last 5 miles of this run, I had been running with Rob but he ended up putting 3-4 minutes on me during that stretch.

4/8: 22+ mile long run easy.  Nothing real interesting about this one.

4/14: 3+ mile warmup, 17 miles at 5:51 pace, total of a little less than 21 miles.  This was hard but obviously a good step forward compared to dying on the 3/31 long run when I tried to go faster.

In between these I’ve been doing some half marathon oriented workouts, using those to create a 2-3 week mini base phase.  Soon it’ll be time to drop the shorter workouts and focus only on marathon specific stuff, but I’ve enjoyed doing less time consuming things like a 6 mile tempo, 4x2 mile, etc. This little in-between season was capped with a 10k road race this morning, which went pretty well, but I'll recap that later.  

It was fun, in case you couldn't tell

So that’s a little rundown of what I’ve been up to.  I’ll try to be add some more frequent workout posts, since I think it’ll be an interesting experience training for a marathon in South Texas in April, May, and June.  At the very least, the race day weather shouldn’t be anything to be scared of!