Seventy is the New Fifty-Five

Week #3 of Boston 2010 (cue the bugles!) Training is complete.  It was a bit of a roller coaster week in terms of adjusting the plan on the fly, balancing an evolving work/life schedule and otherwise staying focused on training during a time of personal transition and competing priorities.  Here's how the week played out:

• Monday - 6.7M easy, with 6x12 secs hill sprints
  
• Tuesday -[adjusted for crazy schedule] 6.2M progression run on TM, starting at 8:00+/mile pace and ending at about 5:45/mile (last 0.5M before a cool-down); I think the foot pod was a bit generous on this run, but that's what it came out to
• Wednesday - 9.25M somewhere between easy and moderate
  
• Thursday - 5+M easy in the morning; 5+M easy at lunchtime
  
• Friday - 9.5M, w/2M @ marathon pace & 2M @ half-marathon pace
  
• Saturday -5+M easy to a breakfast meeting; 3M easy home
  
• Sunday - 20.8 miles, with 2M (miles16-18) @ goal marathon pace

That came out to right about 71 miles, a tad ahead of the week's 70-mile target.  The key to making it work successfully may have been the two "doubles" on Thursday and Saturday. Although conventional training wisdom dictates that double runs are only necessary when mileage exceeds 70 miles per week, I think I was shortchanging my own recovery by never running less than an hour.  I felt better during Sunday's 20+-miler than I did during last weekend's 17+-miler, despite going into the latter run off of a higher mileage week.

This week, I will try to match last week's mileage, before a planned cutback week scheduled for the first week of February (when I'll be traveling for a family function).

One training-related challenge I'm facing is how to put together the quality workouts in such a way that makes sense, without getting too intense too quickly.  I need to be careful about grinding myself down, courting injury and even possibly peaking too early.  For now, though, things are going fine, so I'll continue on the same path, unless and until there's a reason to change course.  That "reason" may be manifesting itself shortly, as there may be a significant change in my professional environment.  It's a good thing, but would be very demanding, and would necessarily result in many more 4:30 am training runs.  I suppose that, as with anything worth doing, the prevailing question would be "How bad do you want it?"

Thanks for reading.  Happy training.

-ESG/Ron