Hello to the few of you in the world who will read this! My name is David and I am in training for the 2011 Bellingham Bay Marathon. According to my calendar (as well as the countdown on the race website), the race is a mere 72 days out. This translates into 10 weeks from this Sunday. The 25th of September.
My goal for the marathon is to break 2 hours, 40 minutes. At this point in training, I am confident in my ability to do that. I have recently finished building my weekly mileage to hover in the neighborhood of 80 miles per week. This total is much higher than I have sustained in the past, so I am swimming in uncharted waters. Of primary concern are my knees, who have a bad history with staying healthy. To date, they have tolerated my punishment from this training cycle. I hope that this trend will continue.
Earlier this week I ran a 16km effort on the track in 59:22. The first seven 1600m splits were run comfortably in 6:02 +/- 3 seconds. At 11.2 km (just under 7 miles), I decided to start dropping the pace. The next two splits were 5:51 and 5:44. During that 5:44, I knew deep down that I wanted to run that last 1600m in 5:30. This was a terribly foolish thing to desire, but I decided to go for it anyway. The first 400m of that final 1600m wound up being a little bit too fast in :78s, and I decided to back off. With 800m to go, the split time was 2:50. That next lap had been a bit slower than I wanted (though :92s was still perfectly acceptable for the original plan for the workout) so I pushed the final 800m of the 16km hard in 2:40, getting my 5:30.
Next time I do that workout or one similar, I will not push so hard in the last three miles. It was good to know that in the midst of an 80-mile week that I was able to run ~10 miles at a pace faster than my goal, but now I must be extra careful with my knees. It has been a couple days since that effort and the ever-troublesome joints have begun to protest, slashing my pace drastically yesterday. Today I cut my run short at 5 miles and probably should have started walking home 3 miles in. It is not worth pushing my body's limits too far with 10 weeks before the race!
Originally, my plan was to run 80 miles a week for all of July. However, I have the feeling that the next several days will be very important in determining whether I wind up injured, so perhaps I have already changed my mind about the importance of keeping my mileage at 80 through the end of the month.
