Goofy Training – Week 1 of 22

I promise this is a post about running not tennis but I since spent last weekend in Toronto with my parents attending the Rogers Cup and I couldn’t resist posting one tennis picture. This is Roger Federer playing Novak Djokovic in the Saturday evening semi-final match. Federer went on to lose to Andy Murray in Sunday’s final.

Now back to running. The first week of Marathon/Goofy training is in the bank. I originally had two mid-week easy runs scheduled but I combined them into one longer run after work on Tuesday with my friend Alice. We’re doing the Horror Hill 15K run at the end of October so we got together to train on the course. It was ridiculously hot and humid but we took it easy, drank loads of water and gatorade and got it done. Actually hot and humid is a good way to describe all my runs this week. I’m finding it very difficult to gauge my pace these days. I’m running slower than I’d like to be but I don’t know how much of that to attribute to the heat and how much to attribute to my fitness level. I’ve been ignoring my Garmin a lot lately and just running by feel. Hopefully by the time the temperatures start to drop I’ll have regained some fitness and I’ll be able to compare my paces to previous training cycles.

Overall I’d give myself a grade of B for this week. I hit my goal mileage of 40km for the week but I didn’t get any cross training in. I just learnt that the city of Waterloo has an outdoor 50m pool that’s open during the summer. How did I not know about this? My goal is to get there in the next week to check it out and get some cross training in.

09/08	-	Rest day
10/08	14.8 km	Easy run: avg 9:18 min/km, Horror Hill run
11/08	-	Rest day
12/08	9.2 km	Temop run: 5km @ 5:20/5:33/5:19/5:29/5:22 min/km
13/08	-	Rest day
14/08	16.0 km	Long run: avg 6:31 min/km
15/08	-	Rest day
Total	40.0 km	YTD: 1122.2 km

Marathon and Goofy Training Starts Today

Today is the first day of my Fall 2010 Marathon / 2011 Goofy training program. Of course it was a rest day so instead of running I’m blogging. My target fall marathon is the Road2Hope Hamilton Marathon which is 13 weeks away and Goofy’s Race and a Half Challenge is 9 weeks after that. My “home brew” training program is below.

I chose the Hamilton because (1) it was the latest fall marathon I could find in Ontario and (2) it ranked #4 for proportion of Boston qualifiers in 2009. I’m not looking to BQ this year but I might be ready for that in a couple of years so it would be good to test drive course. I have a couple of exciting tune-up races also scheduled for the fall. I’ll be doing my first trail race at the Run for the Toad 25K and I’ll be running the Horror Hill 15K with a friend. Thirteen weeks isn’t very long to get ready for a marathon but I’m going to make it work. My goad for this race is to finally beat four hours. 3:59:59 here I come.

The Goofy is a whole other story. For those uninitiated into the world of running it’s a half marathon on Saturday morning followed by a full marathon on Sunday morning. I’ll be going down to Florida to visit my best friend from high school and then going to Disneyworld with three friends. I don’t expect to be making any PB attempts at Disney but you never know.

Of course this training program is just a guide. I’m already mixing this up this week and doing a long training run tomorrow evening!