Total Distance: 24.1 km (15 mi)
Total Time: 2 hr 15 min
Comments: And that's one week of training. With the new shoes my litany of aches seems to have eased off but, on the other hand, my overall degree of exhaustion has come to the fore. I'm taking two-hour daily naps and sleeping ten hours a night. Partly that is due to the cold snap that has struck here but, obviously, my body is trying to recuperate from the exertion as well.Overall, though, the mileage has felt pretty good and within my ability. Slow and steady is the key here. Slow and steady.Injury update: As I said, the various and sundry problems pretty much evaporated when I laced up the new shoes. That said, the two pains that did emerge have me a mite concerned - the achilles tendon on the right and quad at the knee on the left.
And so the long painful - but hopefully, rewarding - process begins once again. I've chosen to use Hal Higdon's . This is due to two reasons. First, having screwed up so royally on my first marathon, I'm really back to square one and training for 'my first one.' Second, having laid off training for so long following that race to heal up, I'm not at the physical level of conditioning to do anything fancier than simply finish.So, instead, I'll be training to finish. It's a picturesque and exotic locale so it's ideal for that approach. Moreover, though, I am training to kick-start my conditioning. The idea is to run this race and enjoy it, take a bit of time off afterward, then make a concerted effort to nail my Boston Qualifying time in the race after this one.The key then is building a quality base of fitness an
Things get a bit goofy for me starting next week. I gotta get my miles in to have the base for upping the distance that will shortly be on the menu but travel will be interfering with that. I'm gonna try and head up to Cusco later this week and that's more than two miles above sea level. Needless to say, I doubt my cardio-vascular system is ready for adding a long-run on top of that. So I am going to try and pack my regular runs in before leaving and then put in the longer run when I get down to more forgiving elevations later in the week. I could be in the jungle for next week's effort which is OK elevation-wise but a problem climatalogically. Anyhow, like they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.