Pass the Turkey Trot, Please

As you can tell by the above picture, there is a sad turkey in the blogosphere today. Regrettably, I will no longer be running in the turkey ten miler tomorrow morning over in Creola. I have been looking forward to the race all year, but family commitments have made participation impossible. Due to this, I have decided to move my tune up race to December 11 where I will participate in the Holiday Half Marathon. That race is roughly a month out from my marathon and will give me a good idea on whether I will be on target to run the time I want for my marathon or not. I believe the race has an eight k run as well for anyone wanting to run a smaller distance than the half marathon. Check the races out at the Port City Pacers website.

Not running the race also means that I have unintentionally ended up having an unplanned rest week, which I hate. I just had a recovery week two weeks ago and I hate thinking my fitness is being wasted or compromised. But, to be fair, I did run twenty two miles this past Saturday so perhaps it is okay to allow my legs to recover and get the benefits from that run by running light the past few days. However, since I will not be running the race on Saturday, I am now going to go ahead and run a ten mile threshold run this evening with three by two miles at a 7:00 minute pace, seven miles tomorrow, and fourteen to sixteen miles on Sunday with pickups. Originally, I planned on running two miles with striders on Friday, the race on Saturday and eight miles with the last three at marathon pace on Sunday. If I can run the new amounts as planned, I will have gotten another quality fifty mile week in and all will not be lost.

Hopefully my run tonight will go off without me getting injured. No day light savings time means all of my runs are completed at night. While Daphne has a lot of sidewalks to run on, not many of them are will lit for extended distances. My fallback running route, "the bowl", is great for running my normal runs as it has a lot of hills to contend with. The problem though is it is only a four mile stretch, out and back, which means to get ten miles in I would have to run the same route two and a half times. Normally this would not be a big deal but I run that route almost every day for six to eight miles and running multiple laps on it daily gets to be a bit tedious. The hills are also pretty steep making it very, very difficult to run a threshold pace run on the course and stay strong for the duration of the exercise since repeatedly running the hills hard sometimes blows me up.

Due to these issues, I usually run my threshold runs on main street in Daphne. This course has draw backs as well, mainly safety issues due to the lack of lighting further down the course. The good part of the course though is you can pretty much run an out and back marathon on it and it has some pretty decent flat sections so you are not running uphill the entire time during a fast paced run. So the plan for now is to run that route, and pray I do not twist my ankle or get hit by a car in the dark.

Next week's schedule is shaping up to be a tough one, but I am looking forward to getting some more hill work in. Here is how the schedule looks:

Mon Track workout (likely 5x1000 in 4:00 followed by 8x200 in :45)
Tues eight miles (Hills)
Wed off
Thur 10 mile threshold run with 3x2 miles at threshold pace
Fri seven miles
Sat eight miles with last three at marathon pace
Sun twenty miles

Hopefully I can knock my runs out and get another blog post written next week. Stay tuned.

Let's dust this off:

Another long delay and another running blog neglected...what were the odds?

To be fair, I have had some events in the past months that have made it hard to keep running and sane, much less write a post for a blog followed by three people. So, yes, I am still running and have not really stopped. Presently, I am training for the First Light Marathon in Mobile on January 9, 2011. I originally wanted to try the three marathons in three months challenge but that went belly up after the aforesaid issues went down. But I have no regrets because of the wonderful, beautiful, strong ass, can't no body hold me down baby boy we got out of it.

No three in three also meant the demise of my ultra in March. I just do not have the vacation days available to justify taking days off to participate in three out of town running events. The new plan is to move the old plan forward a year and do everything in 2011-2012. Hopefully my times will improve enough to where I could also Boston Qualify in December at Huntsville next year as well and kill another bird with one stone. I just need to be able to run a 7:17 pace for 26.2 miles...not to difficult huh?

So that is pretty much the rushed update that I have prepared. I am running 22 miles tomorrow (in preparation for Georgia's victory on the plains) and will run seven on Sunday. Next week will consist of track work and some easy runs in preperation for my participation in the Turkey Ten Miler over in Creola where I will be shooting for a PR. Wish me luck, I ran last years in 1:19:38 or 7:57 pace.

A long overdue update and possibly the end?

So...I went and let my blog get away from me. I guess this sort of thing happens all of the time but I feel really bad about it. I did not want to be one of those people who start a blog and quit it with no send off (even though I have done that exact thing on previous occasions). However, the few people who actually read this thing already know the end results of my marathon experiment so it probably was not that big of deal.

Yes, I trained for and completed my first marathon injury free on December 12, 2009. No, that is not a picture of me after the first marathon, but, instead, is a picture of me after successfully completing my second one.....what???????

Yep, doing one was not enough for "this guy". I had so much fun running in the first one I decided to try it again. Okay, that second part was a lie. I did not run the second marathon because I enjoyed the first one so much. In reality, the first marathon was one of the toughest things I have ever accomplished. Finishing under four hours almost caused me to get injured because I pushed so hard in the final mile to get in under time.

The marathon started off fine and I was feeling great up until around mile eighteen. By mile twenty I swore I would never run another marathon again. By mile twenty four I seriously contemplated quitting. "Hell" I thought, "I quit that blog of mine, quitting this damn race should be a snap!!!" At mile twenty four and a half I said to myself "when the f*&k is this thing going to end?"

A weird thing happened though. Right when I reached the finish line of my first marathon in the glorious time of 3:59:19, I felt the greatest I had ever felt in my life...spiritually. Physically I was a wreck, particularly my legs, but the sense of accomplishment I felt on that day blew me away. Seeing my wife and best friend from graduate school yelling and cheering me on all the way did not hurt either.

The day after the marathon, I decided to run a second one a couple of months later with the hope of bettering my time. I learned some things from the first one that changed my training up and prepared me better for the second go around. I did more long runs over 16 miles and ran hard just about every time out. The result...a twenty one minute PR. I finished the Rock and Roll New Orleans marathon in 3:38:48 with energy to spare. The race still beat the hell out of me physically but the distance was much more manageable this time. Instead of feeling dread at mile twenty I was excited and knocking down 8:20 miles. I also made myself promise to take goofy photos at the end and update this blog so that people would know I "finished the drill" as the Georgia Bulldogs would say.

I plan on running more marathons in the future and am going to attempt the Alabama three marathons in three months challenge at the end of the year. http://www.mercedesmarathon.com/3n3.php I may try and Boston Qualify, a 3:10 marathon time, at the first marathon in December. If the three marathons go well, I will likely attempt a fifty mile ultra marathon next March. That is a big IF though. Running the approximate equivalent of two marathons in one day is a daunting endeavor. Even to someone as foolhardy (when it comes to running) as me.

I will seriously try and update this thing at least once a month. Right now I am in a recovery cycle in my training program and nothing really exciting is going on until next week. I am going to run in the Spring Fever 10k and the Azalea Trail Run 10k in the next couple of weeks so hopefully I can post some pretty good times and update this blog with them. If I do not, maybe this post can be a fitting conclusion to my dumb little blog.