This is the ninth week of my marathon training plan for the Columbus Marathon. The marathon is October 20, 2019. I’m following the Pfitzinger 18/55 plan again. In keeping with the Star Wars theme, this is the revenge of the soup… because there wasn’t enough soupy weather last week, apparently. This week feels like a pull-back week, and I think it is, considering it’s 43 miles down from 49 last week and next week is looking like 56 miles.
Monday: 8 miles recovery. Took this one slow, although my legs felt like they were going faster than my watch says they were, but I didn’t push it because I know what the schedule says for tomorrow. Ran mostly in the park until I took a pitstop, and then into the adjoining subdivision, where I noticed that they’ve made a lot more progress on getting the gap in the streets to fill in (more below). 8.03 miles in 1:12:24 (9:01 min/mile pace).
Tuesday: 8 miles with 5x800m @ 5k pace. Ran this entirely in the park since it was intervals. The warm up was pretty slow, but the intervals were mostly within paces: 7:03, 7:14, 7:09, 7:10, and 7:22 – the goal pace range was 6:55 – 7:15, so the last one was a little slow. It was quite warm, so I was happy with most of them being within pace (and on the last one – if I was four seconds faster, it would have been within pace). Overall, 8 miles in 1:10:10 (8:46 min/mile pace). I was also treated to a light show. Finished the run with some weights and SIX pull-ups (up from 5 last week!).
Wednesday: 5 miles recovery. Kept this mostly easy, although that went off the rails for the last two miles where I started posting mile times in the 8:15 range.
Thursday: 8 miles + 8 strides. Went up to East Fork to get my hills on. I got there under a little bit of a light show and a threat of rain in about an hour. The rain started about 3.25 miles in, and by mile 5.25 the wind and rain were fairly extreme – I was having difficulty seeing because the wind was blowing the rain into my eyes and the light from my RunLites couldn’t cut through that much rain – there was THAT MUCH rain coming down. Overall, 9.1 miles in 1:23:44 (9:12 min/mile pace).
Friday: 14 miles. Got up and heard rain. Didn’t really want to run and got back in bed, and even thought I’d run in better weather (both cooler and less rainy) on Saturday. Got back up a few minutes later and decided I’d run in it since a RD wouldn’t cancel a race over rain. It did stop raining after a while… a loooong while. Ran in the park and the subdivision next to it. Then right at 14 miles, my watch froze. 14 miles in 2:05:47 (8:59 min/mile pace).
Saturday: got up to my wife telling me the water was off. There was a water main break near my subdivision. Between Facebook posts and reality, water was turned off sometime around 3:45 AM and it wasn’t back on until after 1:00 PM. So I guess it’s a good thing I ran in the rain.
This week was 44 miles and change. This is a down week, next week is going to be up to 55-56 miles with the second 20 mile run of the plan.
Mind The Gap
While I’d almost prefer to run my very long runs in downtown, I’m a half hour away and that really takes a lot of time out of my schedule. So a lot of my runs are around Batavia Township Park, which is a minute or two from my house (it’s so close that I could run from my subdivision to the park using the other subdivision, but I’d be running on a 45 MPH roadway).
When I run in the park, it’s a 1.25 mile loop (the blue line in the map above). Adding part of the next subdivision (it connects with a sidewalk at the NW corner, and a partially-paved connection in NE corner – both the purple lines in the map), I can add another mile or so.
When the weather is dry enough, I can use a dirt connection between the two subdivisions. They are building a street to connect (if you click on the map above to zoom in, you’ll see that both sides are named Autumnview Drive). The eastern (larger) portion is about 3-3.2 miles all the way around. The smaller portion is a little over a mile in one direction.
I tend to start at the SE portion of the park, where the big parking lot is south of the baseball fields). I found that one full loop and one partial in the park (2 miles), then going into the smaller section and running it to the connector (2.5 miles cumulative), then running four loops in the larger section (15.4 miles cumulative), finishing the small section (16.5 miles cumulative), and coming back the other way and back into the park (18 miles cumulative) and then doing the remainder of the loop and another loop gets me to 20 miles. Once the new street is in place, I expect that I’ll be doing full loops, which are going to be somewhere around 5 – 5.5 miles for a single direction. It’ll be nicer that way.
I noticed Friday that they have the curbs set, so hopefully by next Friday they’l have the road in.