I am coming off three solid weeks of training with little or no knee pain. This is extremely encouraging to me and I'm starting to get my mind around running my "A" marathon time goal of 3:15:00.
My current success can be directly attributed to making adjustments in my program. First, with water running, and next by eliminating my Tuesday runs and replacing them with cross training. As I have felt better over the past two weeks, I have also extended my two mid-week runs to 8 or 8.5 miles each. I can imagine extending one of my mid-week runs to 9 or 10 miles in the coming weeks.
The biggest two recent victories I've had are my most recent two Saturday workouts. A week ago, I was estatic to run a 20:14 5k. It isn't quite where I hoped to be at this point, but I finished with gas in the tank and my knee feeling good. I can't even explain how impossible that seemed just a month ago.
The second big victory was my mile repeat workout this past Saturday. I did 11 one mile repeats; all under my goal of a seven minute per mile pace. This was a tough, tough workout. But, I finished it injury free.
Here is what my week looked like:
- Monday - ran 8.5 miles
- Tuesday - cross trained on eliptical machine for 50 minutes
- Wednesday - swam for 31 minutes
- Thursday - ran 8 miles
- Friday - off
- Saturday - ran 11 one mile repeats and a total of 15 miles
- Sunday - walked 3 miles
Total week: ran 31.5 miles plus 3 cross train workouts
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