Marathon Pre-Training, Week 10

 This week's stats:

• 7.80 treadmill miles
• 5.87 outdoor miles
• 1 hours on the elliptical machine
• 1 weightlifting sessions
• 2 pounds lost

Total pre-training stats:

• 10 weeks
• 73.14 treadmill miles
• 36.21 outdoor miles
• 17 pounds lost (@ 198)

Five more weeks until I officially start training for this marathon.  Just five more weeks.  Maybe it's the success of the first Running Tuesday, maybe it was yesterday's 90 minute walk/jog, or maybe it's finally being under 200 pounds, but I'm feeling really optimistic.  Giddy, even.

So, yes, I'm doing my happy dance because I'm at 198!  Actually, as of this morning, I'm at 197, but I'm not counting that pound towards this past week.  I'm looking at being under 190 by the official start of training.  That'll be nice.  I've been reluctant to get any really good running clothes simply because I know I'm going through sizes right now and don't want to lay out cash on running gear that will be too big for me on race day.  Once I get down to around 185, though, I think I could start looking for clothes that I can keep using through the rest of training.  Especially if they start out on the snug side.  Up to this point I've been doing all my working out in yoga pants and random t-shirts.  It would be cool to actually dress properly for the activity.

Anyway, yesterday's long walk was a solo one.  I got called in to work in the morning and my sister was out of town for the weekend anyway, so the walk got postponed until afternoon.  By the time we'd eaten lunch and sat down to digest for a while, Kourt didn't feel like coming with me for a whole 90 minutes, so I donned my headphones and headed to the trail alone.  Without anyone else to walk with, I got to pace myself without restraint.  My judge of "easy" pace is whether or not I have to pump my arms to keep up.  As long as I can let my arms swing naturally at my sides, I consider it an easy pace.  So I did my usual routine of jogging the first eighth or so of each mile and walking the rest at an easy pace and ended up with an average speed of 3.75 mph.  I believe the last time I regularly walked distances of around six miles, I had to push really hard to average around 3.5 mph, so I'm certainly happy with that.

So far so good.