Catching up on the posting

I had a number of things I wanted to post about last week. I’ll start with a few topics that likely would have been much longer posts but now they are just a couple sentences. (You’re welcome).

I got a massage for the first time last Sunday with the added bonus of them not charging us because of a scheduling mistake.

Going to a wedding makes you remember details about your own wedding day even though it was 15 years ago. How does 15 years ago somehow feel like yesterday in one sense and forever ago in another? (I should probably go into more detail about this last statement, as it could be interpreted poorly…)

I also may have found the trifecta for my lower back. Massage, Chiropractic with electrostim thenYoga. I’m sure I didn’t look any more flexible to anyone else in Yoga class last week, but I really felt that I could stretch like never before. Of course the majority of that flexibility was lost after my run the next morning…

Then there was our swim lesson. Our lesson is in a yard pool not a meter pool. So when he had us race 100, our times sounded incredible (to us). I finished in 1:20, Genine in 1:40 (I think). Then he says, add about :20 to that pace and that’s going to be close to your mile pace. That sounds about right, not much faster than last year's races but maybe with the wetsuit, I'll see some improvement.

The next night we were at the meter pool. After swimming for an hour. Half Drill, half swim. Half of the swim being 50m sprints. At the 2000m mark I ask Shaun if he’s willing to break off the workout and race a 100m. I was curious to see what my time was going to be in the meter pool. I’m sure he will accuse me of planning it this way so he’d be fatigued and I’d have a chance to beat him. I didn’t, he hit the wall on 1:30 and I hit on 1:31. Not bad, nice to see that I have that speed in me. Now to work on building that into my race pace somehow in time for the TANGO!!

Alright, that kind of gets us up to this weekend. Genine and I took Friday off. She had worked insane hours Mon-Thurs last week. In fact I took the train up to her work on Thursday night so I could drive her home. This way she wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel on her drive home from work. (Crazy right?)

We headed for Pennsylvania around Noon on Friday. It should be a 5.5 hour drive. Instead it was 8 hours. We sat in park on the interstate for hours. Fortunately Genine had packed the Ironman DVD and portable player. We could have watched it through twice while sitting in traffic.

Saturday morning I went running with Jim and Marty. I had initially planned on discussing the Tango with them along the way. Instead we ended up talking about Marathon training. This was probably the smarter topic for me to spend time on anyhow. Here are a few things I took away from our discussion. (Jim, please correct me if I misunderstood anything.)

As we start running. Marty throws out 3 numbers. Something like 1, 7, 4 and Jim responds with something like 1, 7, 2. (I have no idea what the exact numbers were). I ask what’s up and they said it’s their current weight. Ugh! I say that I’m likely at 185. I’m nowhere near what I was hoping to be at this stage of the game. I haven’t made it a priority so how can I be surprised. Point taken here is I have plenty of time to make it a priority for Nov 7^th goal.

I mentioned that I was looking at the Hal Higdon Intermediate 1 or 2. Intermediate 1 having 1 20 mile run (actually it’s 2, But I thought it was 1 at the time). Intermediate 2 having 3 20 mile runs . Jim explains that an 18 week schedule for him is too much. It would leave him dealing with an injury in the final month leading into the marathon. His schedule would have 2 20 mile runs on the plan with enough time to recover from either one of them going poorly.

They agreed that you need to know when to back off to avoid a longer setback. Most first time marathoners get too focused on the plan and arrive at the starting line over trained or injured because they HAD to stay on plan.

Psychologically they were telling me you’ve can't be worried about the distance of the run. If you go in with that in your head, you will be in trouble. Marty’s first marathon was shortly after Oprah’s marathon. They joked with him constantly that Oprah was able to finish so he had better be able to. So I guess keeping a good sense of humor about the event might be a good approach. That shouldn’t be a problem considering I’ll be doing much of my running with Todd.

Unfortunately, that was the extent of our workouts this weekend. So far May is looking like another low volume month. I’m not overly concerned. I’m looking forward to racing Columbia and Mooseman but I can’t even make a guess as to what my results will be. Which could make it fun. If I’m lucky I’ll surprise myself.