Second Week

Welp, the second week of training is in full swing! 3 miles for each day this week and the long run on Saturday will be 7 miles. All five of us are professionals at running these 3 mile routes, so the main goal for all of us to work on increasing our oxygen intake, speed and endurance to help us with the full 26 mile trek we are embarking on. Tuesday was a difficult day for myself and the others as it was very windy and coming back south on our route was brutal! JB and Alison battled through the wind and finished at a 9:13 pace, with JB's burst for the last 1 mile. She's strong! Alison stayed close behind and I brought up the third.

We had a fellow male runner join our group for the first time and it just shows that it is much easier for a male to run than it is for us females. This is not an excuse, just an observation. Not sure if it's the length of their strides, their stubbornness or what the difference is, but frustrating when someone who has ran for a mere 3 weeks can finish at an 8 minute mile pace! Arggh. We need more men in our group to give him a challenge, us old ladies probably just frustrated him. :)

Lisa is working hard at getting back into the running game. She is a trooper and we love her and want her to be up and running with us very soon! Mitzi is still nursing the heel and is basically trying to learn to run all over again. She is working on her foot strike to combat the plantar fasciitis. It's amazing how little things like how you land on your foot can affect your entire running career. And like Mitzi said..."we should've stretched more often during our first training". Stretching is so important..let's not forget and MAKE each other do it!

I read an interesting article last night about the 11 mistakes marathoners make while training. One thing that stood out to me was the long run mistakes. There were two main points made in this article:  discussing the long run schedule and the intensity of the long run. The first point was that the long run doesn't necessarily have to be every weekend. I had never considered this before, but it made sense. Their argument was that if you do a long run every weekend, you're not really allowing yourself to recuperate as needed. That makes sense! So, why not every 2 or three weeks doing a long run. My question is what they consider to be "the long run"?? Is that 10+?? Another point was the marathoners thoughts that they need to run the long run slow. This is definitely something that we have all said at one time. "We will just do the long one slow" Well, what's the point in that? We should be training at the same intensity as we would like to run on marathon day! The article points out that marathoners believe that they will run their marathon faster on race day, but that really doesn't make sense?? So, our next job is to decide what exactly do we want to run that marathon in? And train with intensity and meet that goal! We have to put it in writing and set that goal! And we have to put it in writing and say "We are running a marathon", right JB? :)

Article: 11 Major Marathon Mistakes 

Quote for the day: "If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much"
- Borden