Pheidippides’s BodyBlog

The good news is that my running is going very well.  Yesterday I ran 15.7 miles, getting my weekly total to 40 miles for the first time.  I ran 15 miles in a bit over 2 hours, 3 minutes, about an 8:15 pace overall, including 3 miles of warmup and cooldown.  Counting only my out and back 12 mile set, I ran the first six miles in 49:30, 8:15 pace, and six miles back in 44:43, a pace of 7:27.  My purpose was to run at or under a rough goal marathon pace, which right now is something under 7:30 min/mile.  I wanted to see how it would feel to try to maintain that pace after having run for 7 1/2 miles and over an hour.  Aerobically it was O.K., but my legs definitely were stiffening toward the end.  It was one of my best training runs, though.  Overall pace over 12 miles: 7:51 min/mile.  I’ll take that.

The bad & the ugly:  my diet has gone to pot.  Even while I’m dramatically increasing my running mileage and calorie consumption, I’m not taking advantage of it because I’m not eating smartly.  My weight this mornign was around 174, although that’s partly water weight from eating heavily yesterday.  So my diet begins today. My goal this week is to lose the water weight and get down to 171 by next Monday.  Then over the next 5 weeks I’ll try to lose one pound a week and get down to 166 six weeks into the program.  Then I will need to stop focusing on weight loss and focus on maintaining good nutrition over the last few weeks before the marathon.

I’m also going to maintain a minimal upper body strength program of pushups, curls, rows, and some ab work so my upper body doesn’t go completely soft during my running.  It already is a lot softer than it was last spring.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 6:15 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.