Runners: Open Thread

Went out this morning to run with the club down by the lakeshore. I got there about 45 minutes before we were to start, thinking to get in some extra miles, but as I was pulling up to the street where we had arranged to park, I saw a herd of club members running along together along the road. Lots of people run early, but with that many together, I wondered if there had been a message to meet en masse a bit early this week. Nope. I did ten miles all told, at a very easy pace.

Honestly, I had a harder time than usual getting up to run today. You see, I’ve sort of decided on my marathon training program for the Wisconsin Marathon in May, and it won’t start until the week after Christmas. Knowing that the start of training is now set almost makes me feel as though I could slack off until then. At least, that’s what my brain tried to tell me at 5:30 this morning. Had I been a little less on autopilot, I might have fallen for it.

I’ve pretty much settled on the Hal Higdon Intermediate II program. My hesitance stems from how the program starts off with 26 miles a week and a ten-mile long run; I’m doing 40 miles a week now, with long runs around the twelve-mile range. On the other hand, I have a strong gut feeling that moving up to the next level training program would be an almost classical Very Bad Move. For my first marathon, using an Advanced program probably isn’t recommended (gee, you think?). I wondered for a bit if I should just go completely conservative and pick a Novice program, but the description (“You should be able to comfortably run distances between 3 and 6 miles. You should be training 3-5 days a week, averaging 15-25 miles a week. You should have run an occasional 5-K or 10-K race.”) isn’t me. So we’ll see. I can always make some of my shorter-distance days into Fartleks or hill work if I start feeling unworked.

I just want to plug Buckeye Outdoors, the site that drives the weekly training widget in the sidebar here. I keep a detailed training log there, and when I picked my marathon training program, I looked on the site and found that somebody had entered that program into the training section of Buckeye. With a couple of clicks, I had the program overlaid onto my log, so it tells me what to do and when to do it! Love it! Go give it a try!