johnsjar

Another 7 km in a chilly, overcast, and brisk day. I ran a slower pace today than when I did the indoor track. Today I ran it in 49:41 for a 7:05 pace. The thing about my 3 day a week marathon training plan is this:

I plan to run the marathon at a 7:30 pace so I should finish in about 5 hours and 17 minutes. In a normal training plan, you are supposed to run between a minute and a half or two minutes slower than your 10 km race pace. In this program it’s no slower than 30 or 60 seconds. And that, apparently, is the challenge over my long training runs.

Am I following this training plan? Of course not. The pace is a guideline not written in stone. The program calls for intervals. I don’t do intervals religiously. I usually run as fast as I can handle comfortably. Some days that’s only an 8 minute pace, other days it’s 6:30, and my fastest 5 km race pace has been just over 6:00 by 5 or so seconds, which is not quite a 30 minute race. Although I will do the distance, it may be faster, or slower than my 7:30 goal. Do I care? Nope. Should I care? Well, no, I’m not a professional athlete. I only care about pace for a few reasons not related to things competitive:

The first is to measure my progress over time periods of months and years.

The second is so I know when I am running too fast to start out with during a long distance run. I have the road distance pretty much memorized in the areas where I train so I know how fast I’m running. ( A funny thing here: When I was proof reading this, I noticed I left out the “s” in “fast” and so the sentence read “…how fat I’m running…” which is really hilarious when you think about it).

The third is that it is a goal of mine to run a 10 km race in under an hour. It’s sort of a magic number. This depends heavily on a weight reduction goal of mine. That’s something I have been struggling mightily with for over three years. I have made no progress. At all. It’s probably the hardest thing I have ever tackled including my quitting smoking in 1999. I feel confident that this year I will succeed. Why? Because I have tried and failed so many times. I started out years ago at 210 pounds. In that first year, I dropped to 185 pounds and stayed there every since, give or take a few pounds. I am currently 186 pounds. I need to be stable at 160-165 pounds maximum weight. This time I will succeed. Is there anybody out there who would quit after trying and failing for over three years?

I am experienced enough to avoid injury by not being an idiot and running too much or too fast. Does that mean I will never get injured or make mistakes? Ha! Not likely.