Marathon Training Week 2 in Review

I bet you're asking yourself - where is the week 1 review?  Yeah I've been a bad blogger lately and its been hard to keep up with the craziness still happening at work.  I was asked at 4:30PM today, Friday, to check in over the weekend and put in a few hours if needed.  I feel like Peter from Office Space.

Alright, enough of the tangent...  For those who forget I'm running the Hanson Marathon Method for my training plan.  Its in a book so its got to be good right?  Just like everything you hear on the internet is true.  The plan actually starts off slow and only has 2 runs during the first week.  I did 3 with the extra just being an easy 2 miler to get the blood flowing and recover after running a half marathon the prior weekend.  Things picked up a little more in week 2 and I deviated from the plan a little bit since my body is already adapted to higher mileage.

So I'm running the beginner training plan seeing as this is my first marathon.  I didn't want to sacrifice all the gains I made in the spring by resetting and going back to easy miles again so I decided to blend elements of the advanced program in.  I'm still mostly running easy miles, but I'm throwing in a little extra here and there - as long as they are slow my body gets a chance to recover from my recent race heavy schedule.  I also decided to do a speedwork Tuesday because I'm a glutton for punishment and love intervals.

The structure of my intervals was to do a warm up then do 12x400M with a 400M recover jog in between.  The book says to do these at 10K pace because they know everyone winds up running them faster anyways.  I'm no exception.  I actually surprised myself and did a near perfect negative split on the intervals.  The one aberration was interval where my course took a turn and I had to dodge some bikers so I think I get a little slack.  The other thing that made the intervals difficult was that I ran a little later than normal and hit swarm upon swarm of flies.  I don't even want to think of how many I possibly swallowed.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how week 2 went.  I nearly gave up on doing a run Thursday night since I got home late from work and was exhausted, but I toughed it out and crash after.  Its all about being mentally tough.  That's what gets you through the long runs.