Taper time!

12 days and counting… May 29th is almost here and I’m almost ready for the Traverse City Marathon. It’s been a great training period with several quality workouts, many miles and, most importantly, very few injuries. Marathon runners usually question their training in the last weeks of training. I can’t do that! I have been disciplined and driven in the past 4 months. One could always do more, but am not sure if doing more would dramatically affect my chances to run a PR. I am going to Traverse City with two objectives. First, I would like to run under 3:20:00. The icing on the cake would be running a Boston qualifying time (3:15:59). The big objective of this season has always been the Chicago Marathon (October 10th). I began the training for Traverse City thinking about building a solid base for Chicago. But as the weeks progressed, I kept feeling better and better and began to think that I had a decent chance at qualifying for Boston, for the first time in my running life. So the focus and dynamics of my sessions changed. I concentrated on using the quality workouts to the best of my ability. Qualifying for Boston is not going to be easy but am going to try!

I didn’t do a lot of miles last week (in the mid 40’s). However, I had two very good quality workouts with marathon pace miles in the middle of each run. The rest of the week was:

Wed: 5 miles easy, 5 miles @ marathon pace (7: 43, 37, 23, 20, 27), 2 miles easy. Total 12 miles. Difficult run, the weather was not good (very windy, cool). Finding the marathon pace was not easy but I eventually did it. I finished very strong.

Thu: 6.12 miles, very easy, recovery run.

Fri: 45 minutes, bike.

Sat: 4 miles easy (8:07, 12, 10, 04), 9 miles marathon pace (7:38, 32, 39, 20, 20, 20, 27, 18, 05), 1 mile cool down. This workout is very encouraging. It was a very solid run and the finish was excellent. I like that I can finish very strong with no major problems. My right ankle s bothering me a bit and I hope it heals completely before TC.

Sun: 45 minutes, bike.

Mon: The taper begins