Monday, February 18, 2008

Kicking it up a notch

As mentioned yesterday, I 've made it about halfway through the Higdon book. Two things are clear in this book. The first I talked about yesterday - rest is good. Based on this, the second point is counter intuitive - to run a marathon, you've got to put in the miles. Right now on this Cal Coast training plan, 20 minutes of running a day - sorry to say - it ain't the miles.

Starting today, I'm going to ramp up the three times a week runs. I know I can handle 60 minutes at an easy pace, so that is what I'll do. Today I put in a 60 minute, 5.9 mile run along the back bay. Nothing hard - average heart rate around 150. With this plan, I should be able to start putting in 20 and 30 mile weeks - something that Higdon is high on. This week for example, assuming that I run easy and get 5 miles in each day, I should be able to put in 19 running miles and 12 rowing miles.

The general consensus of most of the coaches in the book is that to run a marathon and do well, you should be putting in at least 50 miles a week. I looked at the training plan and we never get to those levels. So, I'm going to make an adjustment here and start running one hour per day, 3 days a week until about 3 weeks prior to the marathon. At that point, I'll begin my taper. My goal is to make sure I finish - and enjoy it while I'm doing so.

Tomorrow I'll talk about a new calorie counting website I found.

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