Marathon Training: Week One

Today, I completed the long run for the first week of my marathon training. I chose to use the program designed by Nike+ because it is really easy to track my progress. It's 28 weeks long, which means I should be ready by September 11, 2010. The marathon I'm signing up for isn't actually until October 17th, but I'm building extra weeks into the program to account for vacations and possible illnesses.

Week one consisted of a 3 mile run on Monday, 2 miles on Tuesday, 4 miles on Wednesday, and 8 miles today (Saturday). I was a bit tired on Monday but felt great. Tuesday was awesome because I felt really good, it was a short run, and I had one of my best paces yet (average 8'56"/mi). Wednesday, however, I felt sluggish and my knees started to hurt. I realized that I really need to get new shoes because my current ones have lost their cushioning and support. Nonetheless, I had an awesome long run today. The weather has been terribly cold and cloudy for far too long, but today the sun came out bright and shining and the temperature was up in the high 40's. So much snow has melted that I got to run along the river, which made Polo very muddy but also provided great scenery. The toughest parts were mile 3.5-4 and mile 7-8, which were both uphill. I think I just finally felt to feel tired during that last mile, but Polo kept up a good pace the whole time and looked like he was doing fine. It took us a total of 1hr. 20min, and I'm quite content with that pace. I know they won't all be this easy, but this was a great way to finish my first week of training.