Richmond Marathon Training Take 2 - Week 19

Oh look, I'm late again with my weekly check in.

Having a completely insane work life and hitting the apex of marathon training during the same month isn't very fun.

4 runs for 33 miles
2 miles of swimming

Running miles logged so far: 442.55

Training highlights:

• Finally joining the 20 miler club on Saturday!

Training lowlights:

• Doing the 20 miles in a persistent drizzle.
• It was kind of just a bleh week all around. My feet were really bothering me through Wednesday's tempo run and I was really worried about my ability to run 20 on Saturday. Thankfully, it ended up being not so bad.

Gold star of the week:

• The Navy Team Posse that stuck together throughout the entire run on Saturday: Giles, Kit, Mark, Paul, and Teresa. It was a miserable morning but the company of these fine folks is what made running 20 miles on a windy, rainy, raw morning not only doable, but kind of (dare I say) fun. Giles and Teresa navigated, Kit and I were assigned to be the Pace Police (we were trying very hard to not run too fast and stick to an 8:50 - 9:10 pace), and Paul and Mark kept us all in line. But the best thing that happened was that after waiting at a stop light, I forgot to turn my Garmin back on and didn't realize it for about .3 miles... so that meant that I was going to have to just keep running until I officially had 20 miles showing on my watch. Instead of going directly back to the stadium, my awesome teammates went that extra .3 miles with me so that I would have some company when I hit my first official 20 miles. I can't even tell you how much it meant to me and how lucky I feel to have such great teammates and friends. 

Saturday's Dream Team
Giles, Paul, Teresa, Me, and Kit
Mark is hiding behind Giles
We still look relatively happy because this is only mile 4.

Since I'm so late in posting, as I'm writing up last week's report, I am already finished 2/3 of my runs for this week. Monday flat out sucked... the aftermath of running 20 miles hit me (more like hit my legs) like a ton of bricks. Tuesday's swim wasn't much better. Thankfully, today's 10 miler finally seemed to do the trick to loosen up my incredibly tight calves and hamstrings. I felt much more like myself and was able to pull out 10 miles of tempo training at an 8:36/mile average pace.

Thank goodness it's drop back week... "only" 12 miles with the team on Saturday.

"Only." 

Ha.