Marathon #2 is less than a week away…

On Sunday, October 23rd I’ll be running my second marathon. I’m excited, but also super duper nervous. I guess that’s pretty normal considering I’ve spent the better part of of 17 weeks planning and training for one day.

When I ran my first marathon in May my main goal was to finish the race. I remember thinking at mile 20 that I knew I could finish– I knew I had another 10k in me. Icing on the cake was that I ran in it 4 hours 13 minutes. I went into this training cycle with a different game plan. Now know I can finish a marathon. And I know that I can run it in 4 hours and 13 minutes but this time I’m looking to run it under 4 hours. Having a goal in your head is a lot less scary than announcing it for everyone to hear. And I’ve been saying it since I started this training cycle. I want to run this race in 3:59:59 or UNDER.

My hope for this training cycle was to increase the amount of days I ran from 3ish to a solid 5, which I did. I also wanted to gauge my recovery from long runs and I have to say that I think that improved significantly from marathon training cycle #1 to #2. Last time around 18 miles would’ve put me out for the entire day, now I just need an hour or two to recover (shower, eat, lay down) and then I’m good as new. I also ran slower this time around. Some of that was intentional.. some of it was not. Because I was running more days and more miles there were times I felt tired and running 9:30 min/miles felt tough. Other days it felt easy. I also ran with my hydration backpack any time I ran 8 miles or more. I did this to practice running with it because I intend on running with it at during the actual marathon. It’s more comfortable than holding chews and my phone in my pockets.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get in as many long runs as I would’ve liked. My training plan called for two 20-mile runs but I was only able to squeeze in one. I also didn’t do as much strength training as I did during my previous training cycle. It wasn’t a perfect training cycle by any means.

With all that being said, I’m feeling pretty good about the progress I made from earlier this year:

• I increased from 3 to 5 days of running;
• I increased my totally weekly mileage;
• I felt my recovery time go down;
• I started running with a Garmin watch;
• I got more comfortable running with my hydration pack;
• I dove deep into running podcasts and following social media accounts of people that motivate me;
• I’ve made some headway with my body image and relationship with food (more on that in another post);

While there’s still a lot that I want to tweak in my next training cycle, I’d say that I accomplished a lot in the last 17 weeks. And now it’s time to focus on RACE DAY!

So from now until the Sunday I plan to: eat strictly gluten free (because I have celiac’s, not because it’s the cool thing to do); drink Gatorade and carb load Thursday-Saturday, but not to the point of feeling full/bloated; make sure I have ripe bananas; visualize myself at the start line, at mile 5, and 15 and 20 and 25 and crossing the finish line at 3:59:59 (or under). And most importantly, trust my training.

Until next time…