Sue,
I took a look at your blog. You said you're ready to start adding 'speedwork' back into your plan. Why? What is your immediate goal? It appears to be the marathon. There is no real reason to do speedwork for a marathon based on your base and goals. I don't know what you did prior to joining the blog ... but .... since joining you've done the following: September 08 - 40.2 miles, Oct. 08 - 83.3 miles, Nov 08 - 17 miles, Dec 08 - 0 miles, Jan 09 - 79.6 miles, Feb 09 - 198.5 miles, March 09 - 148 miles so far. Essentially, you've got 6 weeks of base in, except, during the last 3 weeks 1/3 of your miles are at marathon race pace or faster. I don't know how many years you've been running and how consistently you've been training, but since September of 08 you really only have about 7-8 weeks of consistent training. I'm thinking that you've got a ton of speed and that you don't need to do any speedwork at all (tempo runs yes). It seems your goal is the May 16th marathon, which is 8 weeks away. If we take 3 weeks out of this for taper, that leaves you 5 weeks (6 weeks if you decide to cut your taper down to the minimum 2 weeks). You say your goals before then is to build your mileage up to 10/day for 5 days and do a long run on the weekend (your plan shows most miles for long runs in the 18-20 range). This puts you jumping from 48 mpw to 70 mpw with only 5 weeks to go. You went out yesterday and ran a 5k in which you placed 2nd overall, then you came home and decided that you needed to get 8 more miles in despite the fact that you have a cold because someone else on the blog ran 70? And then you began to race yourself on the treadmill to get the 8 in before an hour was up? What's going on girl? You're not at all compulsive or anything are you (LOL)?
Be careful Sue. You've got an insane amount of natural speed (it certainly is not a result of base). With so little time left before this marathon I wouldn't make any major mileage jumps. I think you should just do your 8/day with a long run on the weekend (maybe do 1/3 of it or so at tempo pace if you feel the need) and do Wed. Tempo runs. Unless I'm missing something, I'm just not sure you've got the sort of base you want to have to start hitting 5k races, tempo and speedwork, marathon pace long runs, and jumping to 70 mpw. (For more on what happens when you jump up in miles see my blog (
http://dandy.fastrunningblog.com/) and take a look at what happened on March 29th 2008. Then follow things through over the next 3 months until I was able to start training again. Sometime in late January or early February I made the jump from 45 mile weeks to 65 mile weeks. No real gradual build-up, just a jump. I was hammering out the miles, running all kinds of tempo and speed stuff ... and the result was the need to stop running for over 6 weeks to allow my joint inflamation to heal (caused by over-use). After the Marathon is over, take some time off to rest up and then begin with a long-term mileage increase plan. I've been working on my base now since late June. I've only hit 1 week over 70 miles. I've had a number of weeks in the 60s. I feel that I'm just now getting to a place where I can comfortably handle 70 mile weeks week after week. But I won't do that until after the marathon. Even now I insert many weeks of backed off mileage so that I go into Boston rested. I remember training for St Louis last year, my legs were always so tired, almost heavy. But I was determined to keep slugging away. Hind sight is always 20/20.
