I’m about a month and a half into my official marathon training. So far, my longest run was this past Monday at about 14 miles (13.5 plus a warmup walk and cooldown walk). I’m not increasing distance again until the weekend of November 3/4. I have the Baltimore Half Marathon tomorrow and the Army Ten Miler the following weekend. The weekend after that, I will be out of town for a wedding.
I figure that the racing will be good training because even though I’m not increasing distance, I will be running faster than normal training pace.
My pace has been frustrating as of late. I’m not doing a lot of speedwork, as it isn’t recommended in the plan I’m following. Once I’m confident that I can handle the distance, I will return to speedwork. I do run my mid-week runs at a faster pace than my weekend runs, but that’s about it. So I shouldn’t expect to see any pace improvement. It’s just frustrating to see my pace falling.
Here’s an example from Monday’s run.
Mile 1 – 14:28
Mile 2 – 14:02
Mile 3 – 13:41
Mile 4 – 14:52 (here is where I got stopped by a guy who wanted to chat)
Mile 5 – 13:45
Mile 6 – 13:56
Mile 7 – 14:23 (here is where I stopped to look at map)
Mile 8 – 13:42
Mile 9 – 14:17
Mile 10 – 14:03
Mile 11 – 13:49
Mile 12 – 13:56
Mile 13 – 14:24
Final .46 – 6:52
That’s about a 14:08 pace. Which I guess isn’t that bad, now that I look at it. All the calculators say I should be running my long runs at 14:07 based on my half marathon PR, so… maybe I shouldn’t complain. It’s just tough to see those numbers. I’d like to be running at least under a 14 minute mile.
This is when being slow just eats away at my brain. My goal for the marathon? Finish. I’d like to finish in the official time, meaning that I need to run 16 minute miles. So if I can keep my training at under 14:30’s, I’m fine. I don’t have any other time goals. Time goals are for my second marathon, assuming there is one.
But it’s hard to be slow just the same.
My biggest struggle is getting my endurance. I, too, am running the Army Ten-Miler next week (my number is 17xxx something). When I began my half marathon training in July (Allstate 13.1 Ft. Lauderdale on 11/11), I struggled and decided to just do easy runs instead of speedwork. In the past several weeks I’ve been able to do speedwork and tempo runs again. I can appreciate your approach to training.
Good luck on your marathon! I’m approaching the ATM as a training run. As it’s my first 10-mile race, it will be a PR. That’s all I care about. See you in D.C.