Of course, the indoor track is very easy and forgiving to run on. It is a relatively short track, something like 235 meters, so I had to run around it 31 times to make the full 7 km. It is cushy on the feet and of course, totally flat.
After that MM and I hit the pool as usual. My next run is 12 km on Friday. It is my last run before I start my marathon training on Sunday. Yes, Sunday is my first training run and will be 21 km at an 8 minute pace.
It’s going to be really hard for me to stay that slow, especially at the beginning of the run. But if I hope to succeed and finish without injury I’m going to have to employ an uncharacteristic amount of self-discipline and stick to that pace. I think that will be the hardest part of the training: To stick to the correct paces.
My goal pace is 7:30 for the marathon. Actual training paces vary from 7:30 to 8:15 for the long runs and I will be using a combination of short (7:00), mid (7:15) and long (7:30) and “easy” for Friday’s run and Wednesday’s intervals will be run at whatever speed I can manage which will hover around a 5 or 6 minute pace.
It all sounds very scientific and a lot of work just figuring all this stuff out and it is. But you can’t achieve your goals, at least not the difficult ones, by random chance and by winging it. I am guilty of a lot of winging it, and will always do so, but with constraints. Will I run every last planned run of my 18 week training program as it is written? Probably not. But I’ll have fun trying.