Week 1 Is In The Bag!

The easiest week of marathon training is now officially behind me! I'm not as excited as that sentence may lead you to believe. My left quad is still sore from those pesky Strides and I have a bit of pain in each heel that slowly goes away throughout the day, but is a definitely debilitating when I first wake up. More rolling and stretching is required, and I think I need to start paying more attention to my diet.

This morning was the last run of the week and I had planned out the 19km route I'd run for my Medium Long effort. The key on this one was to stay in the proper pace range the entire time and follow Pfitzinger's instructions to start out 20% slower than planned marathon pace and speed up until you do the second half of the run 10% slower than planned marathon pace.

Although not perfect I think I managed quite nicely, thank you very much. My average pace ended up being 5:03/km (definitely between 4:57/km and 5:24/km) as I finished my 19km in exactly 1:36:00. All this despite the fact that I included some hills in my run, so that makes it even better:

The climbing and descending meant that my pace wasn't very steady. The 1st and 9th splits were too slow (5:42 and 5:26 respectively), but given that the first one is a warm up and the ninth was up a steep hill for a big chunk I'll take it. I also went a bit too fast on a few splits, but all except the last kilometre were only a few seconds faster than 4:57/km and these were as a result of some downhill running as I was trying to hold back without braking too much. The last split was the fastest of the lot at 4:43 as I was trying to just get home by then.

In summary, the Week 1 plan called for 52km total and I ran 53km since I messed up the first run. And other than the first run I was on target with my pacing for the most part. Good times!