Day 293, 72 To Go

October 20, 2013

It seems as if another Sunday will pass me by and I will not be running very long.  If you are a current reader of my blog, you know that I decided to skip some long runs and to take it easy on my weekly runs until I start to feel better physically.  Well, I have felt better physically lately and I have started to consider pushing my runs longer on Sunday again...except now my back hurts and running for 5 minutes might be difficult.

What to do, what to do...

I guess what I will do is just recover and not run at all....

NOT!

That was so 90s, but I had to do it.  I will run today, but only for 30 minutes and very slowly.  In fact, it will probably not feel like running at all, but it will be running nonetheless.  This does, sort of, lead me to the last article in the 22 Essential Pieces of Marathon Training from Active.com.

Don't Jump Back Into Training Too Soon

In order to recover fully after a marathon and ensure that you don't set yourself up for overtraining down the road, you should give yourself 2 to 3 weeks of nothing but very easy running. You may think if you shorten your recovery time, you can run another marathon in 6 to 10 weeks. You can do this, and I've seen many runners make it work. However, this strategy only works once, maybe twice in a row, before you start to stagnate. —Jeff Gaudette

If you want to save some time, the article will tell you after two pages of blah blah blah that you should not schedule marathons closer than 16 weeks apart.  That would mean that you could run 3 marathons a year.  Hell, you could run 365 marathons a year, but do you think you will be breaking any speed records?  Nope.  At most, if you want to be competitive like qualifying for Boston, you shouldn't run more than 2 marathons a year. 

If you are like me, you can take like 5 years in between marathons.  I'm not going to break any speed records either, even if in my head I am Meb Keflezighi.

Here are my numbers today:

Time: 30:00

Distance: 2.67 miles

Pace: 11:15/m

Max Pace: 7:15/m

Calories: 263

Avg HR: 112

Max HR: 120

And no, I did not run with Honey today.  That was all me.  Slow as a two-toed sloth on Percocets.  Yeah!

Run for Life!!