Fail

Target race has come and gone. First objective met. Got first in my age group(more importantly the Free Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwiches for a year), but not quite where I wanted to be time wise. Should have been about 10 seconds quicker per mile. Reality check for the Louisville marathon. The training isn't where it needs to be. According to McMillan I'm not even in 3:10 shape. Need to scrap the hill workouts. They did make me stronger on the hills, but my speed suffered.

Back to the McMillan plan and pump up the mileage to around 80 miles per week. No, Louisville marathon, no Monkey bandit (volunteer ?): goal race will be in Huntsville, Alabama, the Rocket City marathon on December 12th. This is where I got my Boston qualifying time in 2004. Great place for a sub 3:00 attempt.

See the benefit of structure in the training plan and how all of the different pieces fit together. The sub 3:00 attempt is going to take a very concentrated effort across all of the different aspects of the program. Lots of miles to build strength. Lots of different kinds of speed workouts; tempos, steady state, and some shorter faster stuff for quicker turn over. Long runs with fast finishes and some fast miles in the middle. The days of the LSD (long,slow,distance) runs are over, no place for them in a fast marathon attempt.

The running streak is mostly novelty, but does help to increase the mileage. More importantly its helping to keep me injury free. The little aches and pains come and go. The plantar facia has finally subsided.

One piece of the training puzzle that was left out this cycle was training with faster runners. The fast guys made me faster. It wasn't really the the target workouts, those where on my own for the most part. It was the easy days, when those guys would push to their easy pace or better and force me out of my comfort zone. Hopefully, most of the guys will be back training this fall and we can feed off each other. Be nice to add some new runners to the group but kind of difficult to get anyone out to run at 4:30 in the morning.