Spring Marathon Goals: More mileage, more speed, one crazy training plan.

So it's been a few weeks since my half marathon in Dallas, and I've been trying to recover and rest up as best I can for my next marathon training cycle.

Pffffft--who am I kidding?!?  Of course I already set my spring marathon goal (for the Glass City Marathon) in the My Run Plan training app and it's already got me training like a beast this week.

This is my best beast mode.  I'm sorry.

And by "beast" I mean "just like I did at the peak of my half marathon training."  Check out my mileage chart for this week below:

App had me running 10 miles for a long run yesterday, which is what I topped out at during half marathon training.  Looks like a lot of big miles in my future....and I know this is the case because I downloaded my whole plan from the app and already freaked out at some of the workouts.  Because that's good for your motivation, right?  Right.

I also made the mistake of setting my time goal at 4 hours in the app, which means that the app scheduled some crazy insane workouts for me as a thank-you (but didn't adjust my paces accordingly...grrr).  Let me give you a breakdown of the workouts in this plan, just so everyone can see what I'm getting myself into:

• Speed work. Now, I always do speed work in any training plan I take on, and I'm always up for some 400s or 800s.  But it seems that this plan has me doing mile repeat after mile repeat after mile repeat....which thankfully are my fave.  Not really--I hate them with a white-hot hate.  But they're good for me, so I do them.  While consumed by hate.  So healthy.
• Tempo/Threshold Runs: Again, these are a normal part of any of my training plans.  However, when I looked ahead in the plan and saw "Run 1:20:00 @ 9:19" my brain kept trying to translate that into one minute and 20 seconds.  When my brain realized the truth about that number, I thought I could hear some soft sobbing and whimpering.
• Long runs: Again, a staple of any marathon training plan.  This plan has me maxing out at 21 miles for the long run, with two of that distance on the plan.  The difference this time is that I plan on throwing some marathon-paced segments into some of the shorter long runs (12-16 miles) just to get my legs used to that pace.  I really think that was one of the reasons I started to crash and burn at mile 20 last spring (along with my nutrition)--my legs had never actually run at my chosen pace a lot during training, so they weren't prepared to carry me at that pace for all 26.2.  Since the app is generating my paces based on my fastest result, it's actually predicting a 4:04 finish...and is assigning paces to workouts based on that slower goal time.  Since I want to hit 4 hours or below, I'm going to have to practice running at my race pace throughout the training cycle in order to nail that goal.
• One more day of running. Not that I always believe more is better, but I did give myself one more day of lower-mileage running per week.  Why? So I can have some short marathon-paced runs during the week.  These aren't going to be the same weeks as those spiced-up long-runs I mentioned earlier, but I did notice on the copious sub-4-hour training plans I looked at that they all had short marathon-paced runs during the week at some point.  If I start to get overtrained, however, these runs will be the first to go or modified into easy pace runs.
• 50+ mile weeks, anyone?  I made one last mistake of looking at the total miles for each week of my plan...and noticed there are some 50-ish mile training weeks.  I haven't done weeks with that mileage in a LONG time (since I trained for my first ultra), but they don't start happening until March..so hopefully my poor legs will have become accustomed to the abuse of this plan by then.

If you'd like to see my plan in spreadsheet format, feel free to click here.  Hopefully all this training and weight loss craziness will translate into a crazy marathon PR, but at a bare minimum I know it will translate into large dog being ecstatic to run one more day a week with me.

Well, he would look ecstatic if he would actually look at the damn camera.  But I know for a fact he wants you to read the non-learning learnings that always come at the end of one of my posts:

• I scoured the internet for at LEAST an hour looking at every sub-four marathon training plan I could find, so I'd say this training plan of mine is well-researched.
• And by "well-researched" I mean "like a high school student does research before writing a paper the night before it's due"
• If you need me in the month of March, leave a message because I'll be running thanks.
• I have a feeling my foam roller and massage chair are going to become BFFs this winter.
• I need to forget I ever saw the training plan ahead of time and just do each run as it comes...so I won't realize how much this is really going to hurt.