Comin' around

I've often said when advising first timers about marathon training that its all about being tired all the time. While this is somewhat of a generalization it holds true for the vast majority of marathon training. If you want to get the volume of training in necessary to run well you wind up being pretty tired, most of the time. That being said, I have been doing nowhere near the volume I have in the past. Nevertheless I am feeling pretty tired lately and this upcoming week is looking that way after the great session I had today.

Backing up a bit, I ran a trail half marathon last week in order to get a good hard training shock in. I had planned to do a 10k on the road the week before but nixed that plan because I hadn't done the necessary speed work to knock of a decent time. I figured the trail half would be closer to the training I had been doing since 100% of my training is in the hills behind my place. The race for me was defined by a single event of me running off-course. Starting the race out I went out fairly hard and put a gap on the second and third place guys, taking advantage of my ability to run the trails with rocks and snow at a fast clip, particularly the downhills. Somewhere around 11 or 12k I was working away up a hill and completely missed a hard right turn onto the gas pipeline route, that was very clearly marked. I continued to run for probably another kilometer until I got to a main intersection of the race where there was a water station and the attendee was very confused that I came from that direction. Fortunately the race director Phil Hiom happened to be arriving there and was able to direct me back onto the course. At that point I was way behind the next 3 guys. I worked hard to see if I would have any hope of catching them but only the 3rd guy was even in sight. I was able to catch him but had put in so much work trying to catch up I was bagged. Coming in to the last 5k which was a mud pit I just put in the work and finished the race in 3rd. Fairly embarrassing state of affairs but was a really good workout and I was happy with how fit I seemed to be.

After that effort I took it easy for a few days then hit the hills on Thursday doing 3x4x60s hill which went really well. This morning I headed out to do a long run with some long tempo work. What I ended up doing was a 25min warm up then 3x30mins hard off 5mins jogging, then a 50min cool down. Truthfully I set out to do 4x30mins but I hammered a little too hard on the first two which are mostly uphill. I was able to run fast and pretty strong on the third one but it helped that it was mostly rolling and downhill. At any rate it was a really good workout and I was moving fast. I was actually really surprised at how strong my hip flexors were. I was able to drive up hills and really stride out on the flats. In fact my hamstrings really took a beating because my hip flexors were enabling me to drive forward so powerfully. I presume this is on account of the hill work and all the hills I do on my easy runs. I take this as really good news because when i ran 2:26 at the Victoria Marathon in 2011 my hip flexors felt like this, very strong.

Next week is a half marathon race in Kelowna where I definitely want to be in under 70mins. Then I have two more sunday long runs to get in some marathon specific work. If I can nail those, i'll be in good shape to run fast in Vancouver on May 4.