Once I got back from all my traveling (more recaps coming soon) and took a few days to recover, I looked at the calendar to count down the weeks until the Chicago Marathon. As of July 23, there were 11 weeks until D-Day. Oh crap! I was so far behind in marathon training, I was practically starting from scratch.
I unfortunately did not run very much while in Europe. I naively brought lots of work-out gear, genuinely believing I would manage to run the majority of days but the combination of wine, site-seeing and having too much fun basically killed that plan from the get-go.
According to my original training plan, I should’ve been running around 14 miles for my long run the Saturday after I came back. Yeah, ain’t no way, no how that was happening.
So I’ve been a bit frantically training, trying to catch up to where I should be. After taking a few days of working out on the elliptical for 45-minute stretches to get my general cardiovascular abilities back, I started training for real on Monday, July 25. Just for fun, here’s what my work-out schedule looked like:
Monday, July 25– 6 Mile Run
Tuesday, July 26- 45:00 Elliptical at medium resistance, 15:00 Strength Training
Wednesday, July 27- 8 Mile Run
Thursday, July 28- 55:00 Elliptical at medium to hard resistance
Friday, July 29- 12 Mile Run (Long Run for the week)
Saturday, July 30- 30:00 Elliptical (Recovery, very low resistance)
Sunday, July 31- 30:00 Elliptical at medium resistance, 15:00 Strength Training
That is an intense week of training, with far more running than I normally do but given my limited time to catch up, there just wasn’t any other option. Luckily, I’m on summer vacation so I had plenty of time to do all this. I’m going to shoot for 14 miles this coming Friday (8/5) and 16 miles the following Friday (8/12), which will finally put me back on schedule.
Bumping up my long runs by two miles rather than my usual one mile is a little bit intimidating but honestly, it’s only an extra 8-10 minutes (depending on how spent I am) so it shouldn’t be too terrible (HA. I say that now, we’ll see how I feel after it’s done!)
I’ve also been taking between one and three 1:00-walk breaks during my longer runs at evenly-spaced intervals (approximately every half hour or so.) No shame, I think they’ve been helping, at least with my mental state. I’ll probably continue these until I feel like my running stamina has truly returned.
With only 9.5 weeks until the Chicago Marathon, it is seriously go-time. No more excuses, no more dragging, no more minimal whining, time to git ‘er done!
Oh man, I’m tired just reading about all this running! Good luck with your training!
Marathon training is rough! Beers after 🙂