Monday, January 2, 2012

Marathon Update Number 2

Marathon Update Number2

Sorry for the lack of updates on Gertrude, our favorite marathoner in training. She is starting to get into the tougher parts of her training program which of course means more running. We not only increased the durations of her runs but we are also adding frequency as well. So far she has been responding well to the workload but has experienced moments of frustration during some of your runs. Gertrude would feel great during a run one day but then without any explanation, she would feel lethargic, heavy in the legs and would struggle to hold a decent pace during her next run. I am guessing it is due to the increase in her training volume. So with her feedback we decided to pull back the volume and give her a nice easy week of running.
So far we are still working with timed runs without focusing on actual mileage but we have been steadily increasing the duration. Here is an example what her training has looked like so far. This sample is from her biggest volume week.
Monday- 50min
Tuesday- 1hr
Wednesday- 35min
Thursday- off
Friday- 50min
Saturday- 1hr30min
Sunday - off
 Next week we will start to introduce some race specific workouts to prepare her for race day. We will start out with some tempo work based of her pace at a recent 5k. This doesn’t mean that the workout has to be at her 5k race pace, we are only using the result as a baseline to determine a reasonable pace for her workouts. If we always went all out in our training we would be heading for burnout or worse, injury.  We need be able to train smart so that at on race day we are at our best and we can use the hard work to get us a well-deserved pr.

Get Moving . Keep Moving.

Ian

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