Marathon training starts tomorrow!!!

The Ottawa Marathon is 16 weeks from today which means that my marathon training program (pdf) starts tomorrow! I mailed in my registration form this morning and I am very very excited to get started.

I’m coming off a pretty good month of base training. January wasn’t too intense but I did log a total of 64.5 miles/103.8 km. They were all easy runs – no tempo runs or speedwork. If you add in the three runs I’ve done so far in February I’m up to a year to date (YTD) total of 76.5 miles/123.1 km. That’s not quite on pace to hit 1000 miles for the year but my mileage will be increasing big time during marathon training so I think I’ll catch up!

In keeping with tradition my first day of training is a rest day. Actually it’s an easy cross-training day but all I plan on doing is going to my 1 hour pilates class. That might not sound like rest but there’s no cardio component to pilates so it’s practically a rest day. I decided to do a pilates class this quarter because I think having a strong core will help me keep running upright late in the marathon and because none of the yoga classes fit my schedule! I’m not completely sold on pilates yet but I figure I’ll stick with it for the quarter and then evaluate it it’s something I want to continue with or not.

I think I’m all geared up for marathon training. My parents bought me a Garmin Forerunner 305 for Christmas and I absolutely love it. The real-time pace and distance feedback it great. Now I can just go out a run without having to premap a route to do a certain distance. The best part of the whole thing might be the graphs! When I showed my apartment-mate all the nifty graphs and maps I could make using the data downloaded from my Garmin he suggested that this might add a month to the time it takes me to complete my dissertation! It’s true that as a statistician I love data and could probably spend hours and hours doing analysis of my running data. Because I would eventually like to graduate I’m restricting myself to downloading data from my Garmin only once a week. Download day will probably be Sundays so I can see how I did for each week of training. I might try to include a few graphs/maps in my weekly training updates.

I am trying to be very realistic about my marathon goals. My primary goal is of course just to finish. For training purposes I’ve defined my goal marathon pace (MP) to be 10:00 min/mile. This equates to about a 4:22 marathon finish which is almost exactly double my first half marathon finish time. That may be overly optimistic but it makes calculating percentages of my MP very easy. For instance I’m going to try and run my long runs at about 10%-20% slower than my MP so that’s 11:00 min/mile to 12:00 min/mile. Nice and easy.

I’m warning you now, there’s going to be a lot of marathon talk on this blog for the next 4 months. I hope that you’ll enjoy experiencing this adventure with me because I’m pretty excited about the whole thing!

PS – I had the Super Bowl on in the backgroud while I worked on this post and it reminded me of the fact that I originally started this blog during the Super Bowl in 2002. So I went into the archives and yes, my blog turned 5 years old yesterday!