Napa Training Weeks 12 and 13... Progress

Week 12 I felt like I turned some kind of corner... like all the miles finally are coming together. I had a GREAT week! I then spent this past week worrying that I had overdone it, peaked too early. Now I just need to settle down and grind out my last 5 weeks. Here's the summary...



Week 12
Sunday - 13 miles. It was sleeting. I ran with a headband to keep my ears warm and a baseball cap over that to keep the sleet out of my eyes and felt absolutely ridiculous. I told myself this was the last crappy weather run I had to run this week.

Monday - Rest. Spent the day at work.

Tuesday - 5 miles... on the hamster track.

Wednesday - 5 miles... on the hamster track.

Thursday - Rest. Flew to Charleston.

Friday - 15.4 miles. "Pace" run except that I had to guess on my pace and distance since my Garmin malfunctioned. I was only suppose to run 13.

Saturday - 26.4 miles. Charleston Marathon... except the course ended up officially being 0.1918 miles long. We were all given new official times. If you missed my race post, it's HERE. My new official time ended up being less than a minute off my PR.

 



It still blows my mind. 9 months ago I was absolutely dying the last 6 miles of the Derby Marathon and now I've run less than a minute off that time on what felt like an "easy" run. What was different? I am better trained? Probably... but I felt ready last year. Did I fuel better? Most definitely. Did I pace better? Probably not. I ran with a pace group last year too, albeit we started at a faster pace and I couldn't maintain it, but it's not like I started crazy fast. In any case I am feeling better about Napa all the time.

Week 12 Total Miles: almost 65

Week 13
Sunday - Rest. Spent the day at work.

Monday - Rest. Another day at work.

Tuesday - 6 miles. I was a bit nervous my legs would be tired and sore so I hit the hamster track.. and my legs felt fine.

Wednesday - 6 miles. The Garmin lives again. I recharged it and cleared the memory, then took it outside and it worked perfectly fine. I have no idea what was wrong with it in Charleston. So this was suppose to be another easy run and I generally don't wear a watch on my easy days but I wanted to see if the Garmin was working so I wore it. Then I found out that my "easy" pace for 6 miles was 9:12. Maybe I'm getting faster after all.

Thursday - 5 miles. Hamster tracked it at night after working all day. I was so tired I fell asleep on the couch waiting on the kids to get ready for bed.

Friday - 2 miles. The two runs I had left for the week were a 5 miler and a 13 miler. I decided to do 13 on Friday while the kids were at school so I'd have more time to do stuff on Saturday. My legs decided not to cooperate. One mile into my run my left hamstring started pulling. After the miles I put in in Week 12, I was nervous all week that I had overdone it and had been pleasantly surprised thus far. When my leg started hurting I thought about just running 5 but then decided not to push my luck and just turned around at the mile mark and ran 2. Maybe I'm being overly cautious but getting injured over 3 miles just didn't seem worth it.

Saturday - 13 miles. Hamster tracked it in case my leg gave me problems but it was fine. I'm beginning to wonder if running in the cold makes my hamstring seize up more or maybe it's just in my head cause I don't like running in the cold.

Week 13 Total Miles: 32

So now my recovery week is over. I've got 3 more weeks of hard training before a 2 week taper. I still feel like I have a lot of things to work on pace wise and nutrition wise. As of yesterday, I'm 2 pounds away from race weight but I'm freakin' starving and I still can't eat enough carbs in a day while keeping my calories down. If you know of a low calorie high carb food, please tell me!