Days, and Weeks, Lost

I was hoping to get through this training program with little or no hitches in getting out there in doing the actual runs. Naive, perhaps, but it still is an improvement over last year, when signing up for the Marine Marathon itself ran headlong into the fact that I was utterly unprepared for sixteen weeks or thereabouts of running. At least this year, I knew there was going to be a lot of mileage put on my increasingly well-worn pair of New Balance shoes.

This year's problem isn't so much the running. I am - or I was - getting out there, four (or at least three) times a week, following the short-medium-short-long plan of training. At the beginning of the sixteen weeks, a run of three miles, even at 11 minutes per mile, meant I was done in a half hour. The long run could still be done in under an hour.

No, this year, the problem is everything else. As John Lennon said, life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. There had already been one lost day out of four, due to the way my fire department schedule worked. Last week, though, everything went completely awry. It all started with buying a car on Monday, from Auto Lenders in Lakewood.  But we couldn't get there before 5PM-ish, and didn't get out until close to 8PM. So there went that day. The next day was the firehouse on limited sleep, and then Newark the next day, which killed the first half of the week. After than, in my undisciplined mind, what was the point?

I had asked that of one of the Marathon Jims, who said, "it happens. Pick up where you left off." So initially, the entire program got shifted forward one week, which meant that I would be short either a sixteen mile run or an eighteen mile run, since it's important to taper properly before the Marathon itself. Now, after reviewing the schedule in the The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer again, I may have miscalculated the start date of the program by a week, or just simply didn't enter it into my calendar as accurately as I thought I had: according to the plan, I'm supposed to have three weeks of 16-mile long runs and two of 18-miles, and my schedule as I originally had constructed it only has me doing two 16s. So, do I drop a 16 and an 18, or two of three 16s?

One of the factors I want to avoid is overtraining. "Ha!", you say, "you're already undertraining, how much do you have to do to overtrain?" Well, it's not so simple. Conventional wisdom has it that one should not increase one's mileage by more than 10% over the previous week. If I calculate wrong (why wouldn't I?) by dropping a week I shouldn't, I could well be adding more than 10% from one week to the next. And that can lead to injury.

On a programming note, Regular readers of this blog - if I might be so presumptuous as to believe that I have regular readers - will note missing entries, especially if you've been following my Twitter feed. I will be correcting that soon enough by adding the entries over the past week or so that I have completed, but not yet documented. To avoid any confusion, the posts themselves will have the date that they should have been written, in addition to the dates that the runs actually occurred. Got that?