Just a friendly reminder that Sunday is marathon update day, we’ll be back to our usual Size Diversity stuff tomorrow! A number of people have asked about my training plan for this marathon. I have been working with experienced trainers on putting a program together to get me to the finish line in time. As I mentioned before, this marathon is different from the last one because there’s a time limit involved. I’ve decided on 26 weeks to build up mileage and then 16 weeks to increase speed. Because my goal this time is more than finishing I’ll be including intervals of running and walking, speed work, more hill repeats etc. I’ll also be cross training with swimming and cycling as well as doing Zumba and dance classes (West Coast Swing for starters) for a bit of fun and of course stuff for More Cabaret.
My training exists in an Excel spreadsheet with cells for each planned activity. Then I get to color them in. Green if I completed them, yellow if I completed but had to move them, and red if I didn’t complete them. This helps motivate me by feeding directly into my desire to cross things off lists. I also keep a log of all my workouts including time, distance, miles per hour etc. so after I cross stuff off the list I get to enter and process data, another of my favorite past times.
The thing about a training program is that you want to have a lot of faith in it – that if you just do the workouts, you’ll reach your goal, I’ve heard other people call it an “insurance policy.” The trouble with that is that it didn’t work last time. I did a 20 week program to walk a marathon, I was at my desired finished pace (8.5 hours) on every walk I took (except the 14 mile walk when I learned what hitting the wall was), up to 24 miles. Then the marathon took me almost 13 hours to complete. I know why it happened but it still makes me a bit nervous – since this marathon has a time limit the idea that I could do all the work and then finish too late to get a medal is something I’d really rather not even contemplate. The fact that my training last marathon so very much did not equate to performance on marathon day was not something I cared about before – since my goal was finishing and I did that – but now that there’s a time limit, the memory adds to that anxiety.
So all there is to do is to keep coloring my Excel spreadsheet with green, entering my data, and have faith in the program.
Days Until Marathon: 295
Current Level of Confidence: 9
Fun I’m having on a 1-10 scale: 9
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