Day 31

Today calls for a 6 mile run. I'm stayed the night at my mother's house in Murphysboro, Il which means that I'm going to inevitably be running some hills today. My hilliest run (up until last Sunday's 11 miler which covered 1600 ft of accent) had been a five miler I ran here several weeks ago which covered something like 1500 ft of accent. That five miler had been an out an back. For today's 6 miler I plan to run the same out an back except go out an extra .5 miles before turning around. Also, I plan on finishing up by running up the big hill that my mother's house is located on. Of course I won't be able to check the elevation changes till I get back to Peoria in a couple weeks but I'll still know that I ran a tough one today despite the pace.

Distance: 6.02 miles
Duration: 47:50
Pace: 7:57
HR Avg/Max: 160/186
notes:

The run was tough as expected with some pretty killer hill work plus I didn't get out the door till about 11:30 so it was fairly hot and sunny. Despite all this I was still able to keep the pace under 8 min\miles! Also, I was able to get the heart rate going pretty good even though my perceived effort didn't feel all that bad. I've been picking up the pace the last few runs and I've been feeling the results in my legs. I just don't have a lot of spring to my step. I've also been slowly deviating away from my HR training as I become impatient for improvement. I realize that I'll have to refocus my efforts here soon if I want to make it to the end of the program but keep telling myself that I'll take tomorrow's run easy to make up for running too hard today. My one saving grace is that I've been basing my heart rate zones off of MHR instead of HRR and since the MHR zones are a bit lower than the HRR zones so I figure I'm probably doing okay. Never the less, I also think that my cardio shape is a little better than my leg muscles shape (even though neither is probably where it needs to be 13.5 weeks before I'm supposed to run a marathon). I know there's still plenty of training to do but I think that I need to really rethink my goal for the marathon. Maybe 4 hours might be more reasonable? At this point I think I'll be happy just to be able to run 26 miles at all... And if I don't completely kill the marathon and finish strong it will probably give me a better chance of continuing my training without too much marathon recovery so that I can be ready for my second marathon... I'm probably getting ahead of myself, but the second annual Illinois marathon in Champaign might be a good 2nd Marathon...