12K - Check!

I suppose since this blog is supposed to be about running, I should start off with a little bit about the marathon training that I'll be doing for the next 5 months. Last Sunday was our local 10K race, which I took part in and did a personal best of 54:17 (woot - go me!). I injured myself a few months ago on a long run with a meniscal irritation/tear of the knee, and had just built myself back up to a 10K distance with no pain (I'd trained up to 25K, grrr!) so it was one of those tough, grinding races. Anyways, I was tired and feeling pretty burnt out, so took this whole week off working out. Yes, you heard me right...I blew off working out! Sometimes I think your body is just saying take it easy, and I figured since today is May 1st and is my first long run to train for the marathon - it was a nice clean start. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Our first training run was 12K - we actually ended up running 13K as we ran our around neighbourhood and we do this little loop that's about 3.3K. Hubs had to go out at 9am so we had to get up at the ungodly hour of 6am to get out there. I know, 6am ain't that early but it is for a weekend! It took us about 1:20:00 to do the 13K, as we were maybe running 6:15 mins/km pace...no land/speed records here but whatev!

So far, I'm thinking my training plan is going to be something like this:

Sunday - cross training - biking/strength training
Mon/Wed/Fri - bootcamp
Thurs - yoga - runners are notorious for being inflexible
Saturday - long runs

I'm not doing a clinic because it seems most of them do their long runs on Sunday and that doesn't work for Hubs. I'm lucky, Hubs runs as well so we do our runs together which is awesome. He'll be training for the half marathon distance so on the super long runs he'll rollerblade with me. We're following a training plan that we got off the website of the marathon we're running, so the long runs that we're scheduled to do look something like this:

Week 1: 12K
Week 2: 14K
Week 3: 16K
Week 4: 14K
Week 5: 18K
Week 6: 14K
Week 7: 20K
Week 8: 14K
Week 9: 22K
Week 10: 24K
Week 11: 15K
Week 12: 26K
Week 13: 28K
Week 14: 16K
Week 15: 30K (crap)
Week 16: 32K (am I crazy?)
Week 17: 15K
Week 18: 35K (gulp!!)
Week 19: 30K
Week 20: 22K
Week 21: 28K
Week 22: 12K
Week 23: RACE DAY!!

Heh. I've never seen it written out like that so it's a little scary. OK, pep talk time - I can DO THIS!