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.