Marathon Training, Week 6

14 weeks until race day.

Apparently I'm better at keeping up with weekly workouts than weekly blogging.

We're back on the workout wagon, and things have mostly been going well.  But with all the running I'm doing now, I have finally reached that point where I've noticed the lower body weight workouts are negatively affecting my running ability.  Especially now that we've been doing a more traditional bodybuilding workout, I think it's not been beneficial to try and get my leg muscles to train for two different types of activities at once.  It leaves my legs too fatigued and/or too sore when it's time to hit the treadmill.  So from now until the race I'll be saving my legs for running, but I have and will continue to do my upper body workouts.

I did my 8 miles Friday night alone, as my sister and I couldn't agree on a time to meet to run.  She's not a night person, and I hate the sun.  In the end, I shaved five minutes off my 8-mile long run time, and that was in 90 degree weather.  I'm still wondering when this is going to get really difficult.

My sister has decided, though, that she's not up for a full marathon.  She's planning to do the first part (half?) and then meet me towards the end to see how I'm doing.  So I'm kind of losing my training partner.  In some ways this makes things easier, because now I can do long runs at my own pace.  On the other hand, this means I'll probably be doing the rest of my long runs at Cooper on the 1.5 mile looped trail because I don't want to just head out of town on an isolated trail by myself.  But I'm cool with it.  I was worried at the beginning of this process that I would need somebody to spur me on to keep going with the training and do the long runs every week without skipping, but so far I've not had trouble keeping up, so it's all good.