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Day: March 29, 2012

T minus one-month… or so I thought

T minus one-month… or so I thought

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As I was feeding almost 11-month-old A breakfast this morning, we had a little conversation about how today was March 28, which meant that a month from today, Mommy would be running her 17th marathon (and the first marathon since giving birth to A), the Christie Clinic Illinois Marathon in Champaign and Urbana, IL.

We also talked about how a month from now, but one year ago, she was due, but how she came six days late–almost a whole week!–because she was still getting her “finishing touches” put on.  It was a riveting and reminiscing conversation!

 

A and me

The conversation was great and everything (one-sided as it is, anyway), until about 5pm this evening when I realized that today’s March 29, not March 28! 

Yikes!

This is significant not only because I everything I told A was faulty but, more meaningful to the purposes of this blog, that means I HAVE LESS THAN A MONTH UNTIL MY MARATHON! 

!!!!!!

The excitement and nervousness and anxiety should be palpable for you, loyal and dear reader.

I can’t believe that we’re already this close–probably because we didn’t have much of a winter, so the training this time around hasn’t been as gruelling as it usually is–but man.

Holy smokes.

For as much as I’ve already run, and for as many huge accomplishments I’ve already set (helllloooooo, January 2012, the PR season to remember in the half marathon!), I still feel like I have a lot left to do… and a lot of improvement yet to make.

I guess this is part of what keeps me coming back to running and marathon training year after year, season after season, event after event: the constant pull to improve, to see what more I can do with my body, to see what else I can learn and apply to my training and lifestyle.

In subsequent posts, I’ll detail what I think are my race goals and race plan, as well as my racing calendar for 2012.  Now that I’m fairly confident my family and I won’t be trekking cross-country to begin life anew in northern California, I can finalize some of my racing intentions for the rest of the year.

In the interim, though, I’ll concentrate on finishing out this training cycle super strong for the Christie Clinic Illinois Marathon on 4/28, including one last 20 in a couple weeks, another good miles-repeat workout (I think I’m up to 6 or so, but I need to look at my notes), and another round of Yassos (I think I’m around 8 or 9 here, too).  Thus, while the calendar says I’ve only got a few short weeks left until this race, my training sched says that there is still work to be done… and how.

Onward and upward!

WDYDT: 6.11 “maintenance,” but mostly counting

WDYDT: 6.11 “maintenance,” but mostly counting

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A couple posts back, I wrote about how Coach Jack Daniels (and others) have written about how important turnover is in an athlete’s speed.  Daniels maintains that 180 strikes/minute is the ideal number that will let athletes gain speed but not at the expense of making them think too much or unduly change-up their running form.

That said, on this morning’s 6.11 (I like the random numbers, what can I say!?), which wasn’t really anything besides a maintenance run following Tuesday’s speedish run and in advance of tomorrow’s tempo, for the second part of my run I counted.  And counted.  And counted.  And attempted to do some mental math (not my strong suit, but I managed).

For the record, it is way easier to count armswings than it is to count the number of times my foot hits the pavement.

How’d I fare?  Well, from the about 5 times I did counted, the numbers ranged from around 94 to about 100.

Honestly, I haven’t done this (counted) since 2008, at least from what I can remember.

And really, I don’t know that I even counted correctly, since I was only counting right arm-armswings (because again, counting armswings is way easier than counting footsteps).

When I did a little interwebs research about this just now, it seems like my values are either a) at maximal efficiency (which seems hard to believe because I wasn’t going much faster than MP this morning) or b) could stand to see some improvement.  I’ll tell myself that the latter is the truth.

In the quest of self-improvement…. because we all know I will probably start counting my armswings and footsteps prolifically now… I happened upon an AWESOME site by a vegan athlete (I’m in love!), Matt Frazier, who also has some great instructions as to how to make your cadence quicker and lighter.  While I’m not a fan of the dreadmill, I think next time I have the opportunity to, I’ll hop on a high school track to give his recommendations a try.  Thanks, Matt!

So what’s the rest of the week hold?  Probably about a 4mile tempo tomorrow, 15 on Saturday, and an hour (or so) easy recovery on Sunday.

It’s looming, folks!