I realized a couple of days ago that there are only 11 weeks remaining before the Mountains to Beach Marathon, and one thing that I have learned over the years is to have a healthy fear of marathons. If you are not ready, you are in for a long painful day….

So, I looked over my training plan (linked at the top of this blog – “Run N Go Training“) and decided that the total weekly GO and Run combined miles were too ambitious and that the whole thing was too complicated. So, I simplified it. I have always like the Hansen’s Marathon training plan. It calls for a weekly speed workout – which transitions into a “strength” workout (tempo intervals), a weekly marathon pace run and a long run. The long run tops out at 16. It calls for runs 6 days a week.

So here is my simple plan, I replace two of the “Easy” days with GO riding and I lengthened the long run to 20. I lengthened the long run since I have already done 18 mile trail runs and plan to do some more long trail runs (and races) leading up to the marathon.

I am hoping as well that my fear of the marathon will lead me to be good when it comes to food choices and thus lower my body weight at least 10 pounds….

So, Monday I rode the Elliptigo to and from school – 16 miles in two rides to replace the Hansen plan’s called for 6 miler.

Today I did the HDR Speed workout that I coach. We did 10 repeats of 2 minutes each with 2 minutes of recovery. It was VERY cold out there, and windy. I wore two shirts and a hoodie. I expected that I’d take the hoodie off after warm up, but that never happened…. Even still I averaged about 475 meters on each of the 10 2 minute intervals. This averages out to a 6:47 pace. The McMillan pace calculator says I should be shooting a little under that, about 2-5 seconds per lap, but with the wind, I’ll take it.

Today of course, is the last day of February so here are the totals:

So, not as strong a month as January, but one that I can work with…..