Today is the beginning of the next marathon training cycle. OBX is on November 10! The first couple of weeks aren't too hard, just working back up to 40 mpw after the lazy month that followed the last marathon (the weeks consisted of: 9 mi, 13 mi, 18 mi, 20 mi). And, given that it is June and the monsoon simply must end, I'm starting back to biking to work twice a week again.
Looking back over last year's log, I biked all through June, July and August. My last bike was September 14th. Let's see if I can do better this year. Let's see if the weather cooperates!
The training plan is a little different from the last two I've used.* Once I get to 40 mpw, that distance stays my cutback week for the first half of the plan. It's divided up as either 4 runs of 10 miles each or 5 runs of 8 miles each. I thought that I would try to do some tempo runs these times and not leave everything (pacewise) to chance. Once I'm 10 weeks in, the cutback week edges up to 45 mpw. I top out at 3 weeks of 60 mpw and I have 4 long runs (i.e. 20 or 22 mi) scheduled. Oh, I'm also doing cutback weeks every other week. I will still probably being running doubles on those ridiculous weeks where I've planned more than 10 miles on a workday.
C and I had a bit of a trail run on Saturday. Up hills, down hills, rocks, mud, and TICKS. Yuck. I've never pulled a tick off myself before. I've never had occasion to. The boys, yes. Various dogs, yes. Me? No. Ick.
*I should add that I make up my own crazy marathon plans. I should add speed work and/or hills, which I probably will, but there aren't any plans that I've found allowing for 4 day a week runs. There's a 3 day a week thing floating around on the internet, and plenty of 6 day or every day plans, there's the 10 day schedule idea, but no 4s that I have found. This experiment with five 8s is just that, an experiment. I was hating 5 day a weeks by the time I quit them, so we will see how this goes.
