Mountains 2 Beach Marathon Training Week 4

Week 4 started off rough and ended well. As I spewed out in my last post, I’ve been having some reservations and doubts about the marathon. After experiencing setback after setback, I started wondering if a half marathon is just a better distance given what I have going on right now. But, I’m still giving it a lot more thought and plan to continue on the marathon train until a final decision is made. Even just writing out that post made me feel better about everything and honestly I’m leaning back toward Team Marathon. To be continued…

I started a new challenge group last week and decided to go back to my old faithful – a mix of 21 Day Fix and 21 Day Fix Extreme. I tried Core de Force and while I liked it, it was hard to incorporate with marathon training. I plan to write a whole post/review on it, but that was my main takeaway. It’d be great for the off season or to add in a couple cross training sessions a week, but anything more than that is just tough. I also considered Hammer and Chisel, a program I’ve been looking forward to trying, but I just didn’t want to experiment with it and figure out how to mix it in with marathon training right now. I plan to do it after the race so that I can truly dedicate to it. Until then, it’ll be 21 Day Fix and possibly the 3 Week Yoga Retreat from Beachbody on Demand.

Monday: 5 mile run. This was supposed to be a 6 mile run with some short speed work along with a 9 minute tempo portion, but I felt like absolute crap and cut it short. I tried to do 3 of the 1 minute speed intervals and I could barely sustain a 8 min/mile. I was still nauseous from whatever bug I was fighting and made the executive decision to end it.

Tuesday: Lower Fix Extreme & 5 Min Core on the Floor (from Core de Force). I woke up feeling a lot better and the nausea was completely gone. I got Lower Fix in early in the morning – after talking to my coach and doing research online, I’m trying to make sure that I have over 24 hours between any intense leg strength training and any intense running workouts.

That afternoon I took Siena for a 4 mile run with the stroller – I decided to run near our house which means lot of hills so there was some walking involved since I wanted this to be a recovery run (it took me 47 minutes to run/hike 4 miles!).

Wednesday: Upper Fix during the day and a group Hill/Speed workout combo (7 miles total) in the evening. Our coach is pretty awesome at finding unique workouts that I would NEVER do on my own. This was no different. We did 25 minutes straight of 2 min hard/1 min easy up and down a (dark, scary – we have to wear head lamps!) hill. I’d say it was about 5 min roundtrip up and down the hill, so we did it about 5 times – M2B has a nice steady decline for a large portion of the race so this was great practice for that! After the 25 minutes we headed back to the flat portion and did 2 miles with the first mile alternating 400s between half marathon goal pace and marathon goal pace (7:30/8:10 for me) and then the second mile alternating 400s between 10k goal pace and marathon goal pace (7:15/8:10) with NO rest at all. I felt GREAT on this segment (despite my legs being incredibly sore from Lower Fix the day before) and ended up running ahead of pace a bit and keeping up with some of the men in our group. This was a big confidence booster run. Oh, and Jim told me that my form looked a lot better on the hills this time (I really focused on lifting my knee so that I could feel the work in my glutes).

Thursday: 50 min recovery run on the treadmill. Nice and easy!

Friday: Dirty 30 Extreme. My favorite!

Saturday: Yoga Fix Extreme. Due to a crazy storm that rolled into San Diego Friday afternoon that everyone assumed would continue into Saturday morning, Kelly and I made the decision to postpone our run and run together Sunday instead of with the group on Saturday (Jim rarely cancels a run for weather). It was pretty ironic when I woke up at the exact time I would have been meeting the group and there was not a rain drop in sight. I immediately regretted my decision to push it off. Ah well.

Sunday: 17 mile long run. Kelly and I met at 7:45 and took our time on this run. Jim told us to try to get 1/2 of it on soft surface (i.e. trail) so we tried to get as much trail in as we could, but probably only ran on trail for about 1/3 of the run. We had a great time chatting and swapping stories of our 20s while we ran. Kelly finished around 15.5 miles and I went out and did the final 1.5 by myself but I surprisingly still felt pretty good. I definitely could have run longer! That’s always a good feeling.

Weekly Totals:

• Running: 38 miles
• Strength: ~2 Hours

I’m really happy with the fact that I got in 4 21 Day Fix workouts this week along with my runs. I always feel so much stronger when I’m consistently doing strength training, even though it can be a little daunting to try to fit it in with 5 runs a week. My speed workout and long run were excellent this week so I’m happy about that. The missed tempo isn’t the end of the world and I’m trying to stick to looking at the positive of the week! Hopefully there are no more illnesses headed my way and the next 14 weeks (seems like a long time!) of training are smooth sailing.

What was the highlight of your training week?  

I still have room in my February 27th challenge group if you want to join! Comment or email me fitnessfataleblog@gmail.com .