The End of My Marathon Training

Haven't updated this in a little while, so it's about that time!  Training has been going great hitting all my planned mileage and paces.  Lately I've been working on VO2max, which is pretty much a measurement of the maximum amount of oxygen your body can utilize during highly intense efforts.  I did these at the track by my house doing intervals as short as 600m and up to 1mile and all done at 5k race pace.  Pretty tough workouts!  I remember the first time doing them it was:

1mi warm up
5 x 600m @5k pace followed by 400m jog
3mi moderate
1mi cool down
(Note - I wouldn't recommend doing these workouts unless you're consistently running 40+ miles/week)

I had a really hard time keeping up the 5k pace for those intervals, especially still being fatigued by long runs and races.  I was wondering how the heck I was supposed to do that for the last VO2max session at 1mile intervals!  Well, I ended up doing the last workout on Wednesday and decided I'm going to hit this one hard.  It hurt, but the satisfaction felt great as I hit all the miles faster than all of the other shorter intervals I've done in the past few weeks.  It's nice to see improvement with all the running I've done since December.

I've also been tapering for the past 2 weeks, so long runs have been dropping in mileage.  The first long run during taper was a 16miler and I ran that with Arlie Ramirez.  He's an awesome runner training for the Leadville 100mi trail run...yes, that is One Hundred Miles!  I usually don't run my long runs at a hard pace, but Arlie pushed me that day!  It was a good confidence booster for this Saturday's marathon and I feel I should hit my goal.  The second medium/long run was a 12miler I ran with my son riding his bike.  Timmy (my son) is 7, but he can ride his bike for quite a long time without getting tired.  He actually gets bored before he even starts to lose energy!  But he had fun, especially with this being his longest ride so far.  I think he may be able to get to 15+ miles this summer.  We'll see!

Now that I've reduced some running mileage in the past couple weeks and some of the fatigue has left my legs, I'm finally getting excited for this marathon.  I've been dreading it for a few months, I think because the monotony of running day in and day out was getting to me.  I'm a triathlete at heart and love to mix things up with swimming and cycling.  I guess being tired often is part of marathon training and it takes a lot of mental toughness to keep going.  One thing I suggest is if you're doing your long runs by yourself, don't wear headphones as it's a great way to train your mental capacity and to really get in touch with your running.  Anyway, I'm feeling great and ready to see where this training has taken me.  And, of course, I'm ready to get this over with so I can get on my bike!