January 7-13: First 20-Miler of 2013!

Last week included two significant milestones:

• The first 20-miler of this training cycle.
• The first business trip of the January to mid-March onslaught that hits me each year.

The first was clearly awesome and fun, as I expected it to be, and made me very excited for the upcoming marathon – 20 miles, now that’s really getting into marathon territory. The second? Well, it’s part of life that’s not going away, and I knew about it heading into this marathon training cycle. I could whine about how hard it is to train on the road, and how tired I get, and how I just can’t POSSIBLY fit in my long run for the week after all that.

Or, I could remember the “No Whining” rule, do the training, and keep working towards that sub-4 hour marathon goal day in and day out, regardless of what city I'm in and what obstacles fall in the way.

Yep. Let’s go with that route. It’s not going to be an easy five weeks into Myrtle Beach, but it’s doable.

Sans whining, of course.

Monday: Rest day.

Tuesday: A 5.7 mile progression run, building to 8:47/mile near the end, first thing in the morning, then 3700 yards of swimming on my own before flying to Palm Beach for work.

Wednesday: A pre-5 am wakeup call to meet the North County Masters for 3700 meters of swimming before a day of fun-filled meetings. I hauled along Ed (remember him, my colleague from Philadelphia who also did Columbia last year?), and managed to talk him into joining me for the evening workout. That was a “track” workout that we did on a semi-deserted street behind the hotel.

Right...still not sure how I convinced him to do that, but we split 8x600 in the hot, humid Florida air as 2:33-2:34-2:35-2:42-2:39-2:34-2:36-2:39. Pretty fast, and pretty consistent.

Thursday: Ed declined to join me for another morning of swimming, but the North County Masters were there at the pool and ready to hammer out 3000 meters, including a bunch of butterfly.

Friday: A 1:30 spin on the trainer, averaging 123 watts.

Watts?

Yup. As if that Felt B2 could be any prettier.

Clearly I have a lot more work and research to do before I can put this to good use, so I’m in data collection mode for now.

Followed up the spin with the new toy with 45 minutes of strength training and stretching.

Saturday: The first 20 miler of the season! Finished at 9:36 pace, closing the final 5 miles in 9:26-9:24-9:36-9:18-9:13.

Sunday: 3500 meters of fairly easy swimming in the morning, then 16 miles of biking to and from coaching in the drizzly weather.