Out of town, take two- the runner’s perspective

Now it’s time to translate my last post into what it means for my running. As I’ve said, I’m training for an October full marathon, so I really want to keep up with my training while I’m down here so that the marathon is only miserable for the right reasons (it’s a really long way) and not the wrong ones (I wasn’t prepared).

I have a half marathon this weekend, but I haven’t been treating it as a goal race. I wanted to jump at the opportunity to do a race while I’m down here, and this looks like a really big and hopefully fun event. It’s a point-to-point race, too, so I should get to see a lot of the city.

My marathon plan recommends that if you do race during the plan, you run the Tuesday speed session as normal, but trade the Thursday marathon pace run for easy miles of the same distance. Then, after the race, you just get right back to normal the following week. But, that recommendation is for a 10K race, which takes less recovery than a half marathon does, at least for me.

The other factor is that I have some travel coming up in the next 2 weeks that might make it hard for me to run at all. So I really didn’t want to come in under my target mileage for this week, and then be low the next two weeks as well. That would be too much to miss, and I think it would make it tough to jump back into my plan, which is just starting to really ramp up.

To get all my miles in with the trip out of town, I ran my speed session on Monday and got up early on Tuesday to run 8 miles before I had to catch my bus. I did take Wednesday off while I was out of town, and tried not to get too twitchy whenever I saw a runner or somebody mentioned going to the gym. When I got back in to downtown on Thursday, I ate breakfast downtown before heading home. It was a nice excuse to hit my favorite restaurant (out of the one actual “restaurant” I’ve had a meal at, of course), but also it meant that by the time I got the bus back to my house, I should be far enough away from breakfast that I should be able to run.

So I ran 7 miles yesterday AM after the red-eye bus trip! The nice thing is that I am at a point in my training where the one scheduled rest day really leaves me feeling like a million bucks the following day.

Today it was just 6 miles easy, tomorrow it will be down to 4, and that should leave me with enough miles on Sunday to do my warmup and race and hit my 47 scheduled miles for the week. Whew!

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