Training Review

Did 4 miles of recovery outside today. It kinda warmed up a bit today, still below freezing. The cold doesn't bother me that much and the wind I can handle if I'm dressed properly. What I can't take however is the trying to run on snow covered side walks which causes me to slow down. I 'm going to try and do 12 miles outside tomorrow, but part of me wants to do it on the treadmill.

So I spent some time reviewing Ryan's blog today to see how his training was going leading up to Chicago last year. He did the same training plan that I'm doing now and had the same goal then as I do now of reaching 3:10. Unfortunately his training paces were WAY faster than what I'm doing now. I'm doing an 8:35 pace for a long run now, whereas Ryan was doing faster than 8:00 min miles at this point of his training. This is causing me to rethink whether it's feasible to try for a BQ this spring as I definitely don't think I can drop down to sub 8:00 long runs during the next 12 weeks of training. The one glimmer of hope that I do see is that Ryan ran a 3:30 marathon last spring using training paces that were much faster than what I was doing for my 3:17 marathon in Chicago so maybe I can get away with going slower. It's hard to say. I think I'm going to have to rely on the tune-up races to judge where I'm at.

Oh yeah, I changed my name to something that more closely matches my real name. I never really liked my previous pseudo name. I ended up choosing it cause it matched my blog title which I thought was clever, but I never really got used to it.