Photo by Jianwei in the Outdoor Vancouver Flickr Group
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 four posts here, here, here and here.
Another month is in the books and I’m approaching the crux of my training. February overall was pretty disappointing. My mileage was very low and I’m starting to worry a bit.
Around mid-month I got my longest run in to date, at 28.5km, in 2 hours 25 minutes. It was a nice run looping around the Burrard inlet over the Iron Workers and Lions Gate bridges. However, shortly after that run I got sick and took 4 days off to rest. Then, since I was moving houses this week, I had been too busy to get any runs in after work and missed another nice steak of 4 consecutive days. It all adds up to a measly 202 kms of running in February. I’m going to have to crush it in March to have a chance at a 3:05 marathon in May, and this will be a crucial month of training for me. I’ll be ramping up the long runs, and adding in lots of tempo work.
The good takeway from February is I can compare one workout I did on Feb 24, 2013 to the same training run on Feb 26, 2012. The workout was
2km warmup
4 x (5 minutes hard pace with 1 minute rests)
1 hour easy pace
20 minutes hard pace
2km cool down
Last year I completed this workout covering 22.88km in 1:53 (and only managed 15 minutes of hard effort at the end instead of the prescribed 20). This year I covered 24.79km in exactly 2 hours and I felt pretty good. My pace was up over last year so that’s very encouraging. The weather was also horrible so I had that working against me, and my legs were a bit tired from the day before. So overall, I think I’m on the right track and my fitness is better than this time last year, but with such low mileage I’m worried I’m not improving enough to hit my goal.
The reason my legs were tired for that run is that I actually had a chance to take a VO2 max and lactate threshold test with Peak Centre for Human Performance in Burnaby the day before. The assessment was a really neat (and painful) experience and it will be nice to know my proper training zones. I’m going in for a consult on the results next week, so it will be interesting to see where they think I should be training vs. what I have actually been doing thus far. I’ll do a full post next week about the assessment and the results, and resulting changes to my training!
