Finally, Marathon Training Is About To Begin

I have just a couple more days to wait until I am officially training for the City of Oaks Marathon and I am feeling a combination of excited and nervous. I am excited because I am a step nearer to running my first Marathon and I enjoy running more when I have a goal to work towards, but I am nervous that my body won't be able to handle the strain of running over 650 miles in 18 weeks and that injury will prevent me from lining up at the start line of a Marathon for the second year in a row.

In order to try to avoid getting injured, I have decided to use a more "typical" Marathon training plan than I used last year (when I used the "Run Less, Run Faster" approach of only running three times a week). The year I will be running 5 days a week. The week day runs will range in distance from 3 to 10 miles but will all be at an "easy" pace. On most weeks, Saturday will be a "Marathon Pace" day with a range of 5 to 10 miles at Marathon Pace. Sunday will be "long run" day with distances ranging from 8 to 20 miles (I will run three 20 mile long runs during my training). Here is a link to my Training Plan.

I feel like I have a good base level of fitness (much better that last year) as I have covered over 650 miles so far this year and my last 10 weeks of running (not including this week) have been 31, 38, 20, 36, 20, 33, 32, 25, 34 and 18 miles respectively. I am hoping that the good base combined with a lower number of miles at faster than race pace will help me avoid injury during training this time around.

I have set myself a single goal of finishing the Marathon. Running 26.2 miles will be a new experience for me and I have no idea how I am going to react physically or mentally and I don't want to add additional, unnecessary pressure to myself by setting a time goal. That being said, I have picked a pace (8:30-9:00 per mile) that I will at train to be able to run and at should be able to run the entire distance at.

To put that pace in to perspective, based on my recent Half Marathon time (1 hour 36 minutes), an experienced Marathoner would typically be able to run a Marathon in 3 hours 20 minutes (7:40/mile). I am hoping that that difference of about a minute per mile will give me a better chance of a) getting through the training in one piece and b) getting through the race!

I will try my best to blog weekly updates on my progress but for those of you that want to follow me more closely, you can follow me on dailymile.com here where I will be uploading each of my training runs along with some comments within a few hours of each run.