I’m currently training for the 2013 BMO Vancouver Marathon and am one of six official bloggers. Each week I’m providing updates on my training and experience leading up to May 5. You can read my first two posts here and here.
Well, January is under my belt and I posted a total mileage of 240km, which is actually about 15km less than I ran last January. I think it may be the first time I’ve ever had a year-over-year decrease in mileage. I think part of the reason is that last year the building I was working in at the time had a shower, so I was able to post some two-a-day workouts by running to work and then back home for a total of 25km.
Regardless, I’m still pretty happy with my training to this point. Even if the mileage is a bit less than January 2012, I feel like the only thing that was cut out was a few ‘junk miles’ (ie, slow, steady runs in the 6 – 12km range). Runs that don’t really put any new stress on what your system is already comfortable with, and therefore don’t accomplish much.
My quality sessions were all really good. These were mostly interval sessions at a track, or on the flat seawall. A typical interval session in January looked like:
2km warmup
5 x (5 min @ 4:15 min/km pace with 3 minute recovery jogs)
9km easy
or
2km warmup
2 x (10 min at hard pace with 3 minute recovery jogs)
45 min easy
My longest run was 28km in the Lower Seymour Conversation reserve on a combo of road and flat trail.
In my last post I talked about some pain in my IT band, and I’m glad to say it has mostly subsided. It was quite painful for a few days but I was able to run through it. After a week of some horrible, horrible foam rolling and stretching (I followed this Youtube Video), I saw a lot of improvement in it.
So far so good! Looking ahead to February, I’ll be doing more interval sessions similar to January, but adding in some longer runs (25+ km) as well as longer tempo efforts (~20 minute sets). I’m also looking forward to a 25km trail race at the beginning of March, which I have used in the past few years as a great tune-up for the Vancouver Marathon. In order to get my legs ready for that, I’ll be hitting some technical trails and running some hills this month as well. The race should also provide a good benchmark of my fitness as I’ve done it the last 2 years in a row. Whether or not that type of trail running is ideal training for a marathon, I have no idea, but I really enjoy getting muddy on the trails so I’m looking forward to it!
In other cool news, I was in The Province newspaper last Sunday (top photo) for a marathon Q&A, along with 2 of the other BMO Van Marathon bloggers Tess and Nicole. You can read the article here: http://www2.canada.com/theprovince/news/sports/story.html?id=2d2f895e-99d6-4777-872b-1e712c415552
