It begins...

And so begins the first week of training for an October 17 marathon.  Doing the old reliable Pfitzinger 18 week/55 mile plan that has gotten me through many a marathon.  You should hopefully see a bit more posting, but it just seems that everything that I've wanted to say over the years has already been said.  Having said that I will try and post a bit more.

Week so far has gone okay.  Did 7 miles with 10 strides on Tuesday. Did 9 miles which included 3 miles at around 7:10 min/mile pace and then did 2x800m at about 3:17/800m.  Did 5.4 miles today at a recovery pace and will try and do 14 miles tomorrow for a long run. 

I was planning on doing an after work 5 mile race next week, but have decided against it.  There were a couple of reasons for it.  The G20 meeting is next weekend and everyone is being advised to work from home in the week leading up to it.  Our building isn't in the security perimeter, but everyone is on high alert about protests downtown. I don't have to be told twice to stay home since I generally hate the commute to begin with so I'm staying home.  Second reason is that my LT run this past Thursday just sucked.  I was hoping I would be able to handle 3 miles at 7 min/mile comfortably, but this just wasn't so.  I'm fairly certain I wouldn't be able to maintain that pace for 5 continuous miles.  Maybe if I had another month i could make it so, but I have less than a week.  Lastly, I've finally decided to get a stress test done for my heart which I'm having done next week.  Those of you have been following for a while and can remember my graphs know that on occasion I have had issues with my heart rate spiking while running.  It happens during training and in races, but doesn't happen all the time and I don't really know what causes it or if it's a cause for concern.  This should hopefully shed some light on it.

I've been reading up on it and what I've been able to discern (thank you wikipedia) it's  a treadmill test where they hook you to an EKG and walk/run on a treadmill and they try and detect changes in your heart rhythm as the work load increases.  I'll post more about the experience after it happens. I just hope they don't expect me to run a 5k pace on a treadmill indoors attached to a bunch of wires. I get flustered trying to do runs with my headphones plugged into the treadmill; I can't imagine what it would be like with an umpteen number of wires attached to my chest.