Good Day for an Update

Today is the perfect day for an update. For those of you who check for updates frequently, I apologize for the lack of activity in this blog. I think my silence is due to many things, mostly the transition to cold weather and my lack of a specific race to train for. So, I've decided to take a 16 week marathon training plan and stretch it out to 27 weeks. Yes, starting today I'm officially training for my first full marathon! I'm doing the Madison Marathon on Sunday, May 25, 2008.

I started my "treadmill season" on 11/7, and prior to today I had logged a disappointing 25 miles this month after logging 46 in October. The 16 week plan I'm following is from Runners World, but I've customized it by choosing 11 weeks in the plan and doubling them so I can stretch it to 27 weeks. I think it will work, and if things continue as they've been going, I'm hopeful that I wont have so many injuries to deal with this time. I feel great now every time I run!

Today's plan called for a Tempo Run - Dist: 5mi. inc Warm; 3mi@10:14; Cool, and that's EXACTLY what I did to kick things off. Overall, I completed the 5 miles in 53:11, so I averaged about 11:10/mile for the warm-up and cool-down miles.

Today was also a special day, because this run put me at exactly 500 miles since I started running on June 14, 2006! It also put me up to 380 miles in 2007. My goal was 450 for the year, and it's looking like I'll probably come up around 15 miles short but I'm still happy with all that I accomplished this year.

I'll be focusing on 3 things in 2008:

1. The Madison Marathon on May 25th.
2. The Ragnar Great River Relay on August 22-23. Me and 11 others will be competing in a 200 mile relay from LaCrosse, WI to Minneapolis, MN over the course of about 35-37 hours!
3. Sprint Triathlons - I hope to compete in 3-4 of them.

The best part of all of this is that my wife will be on the relay team for Ragnar, and she's also hoping to do her first sprint tri! How awesome is that?

That's all for now. I'll try to be a more reliable poster. Thanks for your patience and for coming back to check on me. I appreciate all the support all of you give me in your own unique ways.

It's November Already

Sorry again for the lack of updates. It's just not very exciting now that I'm not racing and not really training for anything specific in the very near future.

I did manage to log 46 miles of running last month, which was my 2nd biggest month of the year. I haven't put in a lot of miles the last couple of weeks though, and with the time change and my dislike of running in the dark, it looks like I'll either have to start running in the morning or on the treadmill, and I'm not sure which of those I hate worse. Maybe I'll try something different and get on the elliptical machine at the Y and see how that feels. My wife loves it, so it's worth checking it out.

Speaking of the Y, the pool is open now, but I've been so busy that I've only been there once and only swam about 250 yards. I REALLY need to find a swim coach to help get me ready for the tri season next summer. I also need to get some miles in on the bike, and with the cold and dark moving in it looks like those miles will be on the trainer or the stationary bike.

I should note that I feel great. I did 5 miles on Sunday, and it was probably the best I've felt at that distance all summer. I didn't break any speed records, but I wasn't trying to do anything but a nice easy run, so I was very happy with the results. Ideally, I'll be able to average 10-15 miles/week of running through the winter. I'm not sure on my biking and swimming goals yet, so that will give me something to talk about in a future post.