Objective: Easy day Weather: 50's, clear w/ a few cirrus clouds; pretty sunrise. 15 min. abs & wts.
Running in my sleep this morning, zzzzz. Actually, I love that feeling of knowing there is no reason to push myself on easy days, and every reason to relax and let myself be slow. RESToration. Dale's comment yesterday about my long run got me thinking that I would like to put my reasoning in black and white for posterity, commentary and just a sense of clarity for myself. Most training programs cap the long run around 20 miles, but I have never been comfortable with that number. In my early marathons, when I was training with the Galloway method, I actually ran up to 27 miles, but my goal back then was just "to finish," and I could afford to give up quality weekday runs for the sake of distance. When I started aiming for time goals, I had to make sure that my long runs were not so long that I needed 3 or 4 days recovery. Weekdays were needed for some speed work. But the 20 mile cap was too frightening; at my slow pace it means almost an hour of extra running on marathon day (compared to my longest long run). I settled on 23-24 miles as a comfortable but still demanding distance. As long as the pace is slow enough, this is the distance that will fill up approximately the same amount of time as my marathon goal time. Who knows, when I get faster I may be able to shorten it! :) And now the "posterity" part... I want to go through my paper log and list all the weekend long runs I've done since April. I was very ill during the winter, and April is about when my training became somewhat normal again (despite continued bad weather -- snowfall even in that late month!). Some of these runs were "fast finish" or had MP sections in them, but I'll just list distances. Hopefully this will be a confidence builder for me... April: 16.32, 10.12, 12.32, 17.85. May: 0 (vacation), 18.2, 19.54, 18.17. June: 18.25, 20.2, 16.37, 0 (vacation), 20.1. July: 20, 19.92, 21.3, 20.52. August: 13.5, 22.05, 15.15, 19.86 (b/t 2 runs), 21.15. Sept: 19.55, TO DO: 23, then taper.
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