Sunday, May 15, 2011

The Race Re-Structuring

After my marathon, I've decided to back off the marathon (and marathon training) a bit.  I had originally planned on doing the Tuepelo Marathon in the fall and then the Disney Marathon (actually both the half and the full for anyone who's counting) in January.  However the date for the Tuepelo Marathon is extremely close to the arrival date of my new nephew or niece (much to my lovely wife's chagrin, my brother and his wife have decided to keep it a "surprise").  Throw in the fact that the CMM just beat the ever-loving crap out of me...again.  So frankly, I'm more than a little tired of training for distance.  Instead, I'm going to be working on speed and strength with just a smattering of distance (I've gotta get ready for the Goofy Challenge sometime).  This means a lot of intervals, more hill work (since I did almost no hill work last year, nearly anything will be a VAST improvement), faster tempo runs (my hamstrings are crying just looking at that sentence), even more gym/home workouts (I have to admit the skeletally skinny runners tend to freak me out.  Guys, lift a weight and eat a sandwich!), and whater ever neo-workout (i.e. torture) I read about.  That being said, I've been doing speed work for the last 2 weeks and it has been enormous fun.  My weekly mileage has been low (14 and 21), and though I feel slightly guilty about that, it has been extremely fun just cutting loose.  So for the rest of the year, I'm sticking with 5k's, 10k's and half-marathons, and then more of the same after Disney in January.  My hope is to do the Chicago Marathon in 2012.  I just got back from a work conference in Chicago, and I ran nearly  every day that I was there.  Running around downtown Chicago was a blast (even slightly hungover), because I could really explore the city that way.  Add in that it was mostly flat with plenty of pedestrian access, so now I have to do the marathon there.  I even did a 5K race around Soldier Field, but that my friends is a story for another day.

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