Marathon Pre-Training, Week 4

Why the hell do manufacturers make shoelaces so freakin' long?  Why?  Grr!

Anyway, aside from relacing my shoes about twelve times and retying them that many times per workout, this week has shaped up as follows:

This week's stats:

• 7.61 treadmill miles
• 5.14 outdoor miles
• 1.5 hours on the elliptical machine
• 4 weightlifting sessions
• 1 pounds lost

Total pre-training stats:

• 4 weeks
• 27.02 treadmill miles
• 10.85 outdoor miles
• 6 pounds lost

I felt pretty good this week, energy wise, and I think I probably owe that to actually getting a good night's sleep last Saturday night.  I go to work way earlier on Sunday mornings (6am) than usual, and I have a tendency to still go to bed fairly late on Saturday night because going against my normal sleep schedule just one night a week is hard.  My body isn't ready to sleep yet at the time when I know I SHOULD be going to bed, so I stay up.  Then I'm tired on Sunday from getting up so early and I start the week playing catch up.  Didn't do quite as well last night.  Oh, well.  But six hours is better than four.

It finally worked out schedule-wise for me to do a long walk with my sister this week, so we planned to meet up at the trailhead Saturday at 9:30am.  I almost backed out and suggested we hit the treadmills at the gym when I saw that it was 30 degrees out, but I didn't want to be the one to wuss out first.  So we went.  It wasn't too bad.  Slightly windy at the beginning, but I had my ears thoroughly covered (headband over them plus winter hat with ear flaps) so it wasn't bad as long as we kept moving.  Oddly enough, I wasn't the one who had to stop midway and pee on the side of the trail.  I guess one perk to going out in freezing weather is that there's better chance of getting a little solitude out there.  Still, my goal is to avoid having to do that.  In sunny weather I'm not thinking there would be opportunity to do so sans audience.


My main frustration right now is trying to find a balance between exercising to lose weight and exercising to pre-train.  I'm trying to get as much cardio and speed benefit out of this pre-training time as I can without pushing myself too hard and burning myself out because I have doubts about my ability to build enough speed during the 18 weeks of actual training.  Those doubts may be unfounded, but they're there, bouncing around in my head and being annoying.  That's why I've been considering a walk/run approach instead of just walking, thinking that if I can make nice with this whole running thing (we've always kind of hated each other) I don't have to worry so much about that pesky time limit.  On the other hand, I know from my past experience that dropping weight will go a long way on its own to improve my speed, but at the rate I'm losing weight now I can maybe expect to be down to around 170 pounds by race day.  Granted it would be a leaner, stronger 170 pounds, and theoretically the stronger I am the easier time I'll have.  But every extra pound I have to haul to the finish line also theoretically makes me a little slower, whether it's muscle or fat.  I'd prefer to be down to around 150 by then.  And it could be that the initial muscle gains that have been canceling out the fat loss on the scale are starting to level off and I just don't even need to worry about this.  I'm willing to cut my diet back to where it was before Andrew convinced me to up it, but I don't want to cut back if it would impede my strengthening and speed progress.  I just know if I'm going to focus on weight loss before the marathon I should do it now and not when I'm actually in training mode.  I'll give it another week or two.  I did lose a pound this week, despite having new strength exercises added to our routine.  It's just that not seeing the kind of results on the scale that I'm used to seeing is a frustration.

That, and these pesky shoelaces.