Friday, May 30, 2008

Marathon training tracker - May 29

I ran 9 kilometers today. I was actually a bit tired on my way home and I was thinking of skipping training and postponing it to the next day. But when I got home, I somehow felt a surge of energy, and that was enough to get me to the gym.

My last few runs hadn't been very good. I mentioned running for an hour a while back, and I didn't manage to run for the entire hour as I had to slow down to a brisk walk twice. Earlier this week, I had intended to run for 45 minutes but about 20 minutes in, I started to feel extremely dehydrated, so I ended up stopping after about 33 minutes. To add to this, I'm not as fast I was two years ago.

So I decided that for my training today, I would run at a fairly slow pace - around 8.5 kilometers per hour - and just try to sustain that for an entire hour. What was great about my training run was that I not only managed to run for the entire hour without stopping, I also managed to keep going faster and faster and never dropped speed. I went up slowly from 8.5kph to 10kph towards the end of my run, and I even sprinted for the last couple hundred meters. I was feeling quite tired late in my run and wanted to slow down actually, but I managed to will myself to keep going which I did.

I've also started taking Mike's advice of putting ice on my knees after each training run. I had a bit of knee pain for most of the second half of last year and I want to make sure my knees stay injury-free. So far, they've held up. Hopefully it stays that way.

I am now planning to run 1 hour and 20 minutes on Saturday and hopefully I can cover 12 kilometers in this training run. I don't know exactly when the marathon will be but it should be sometime in July, so I have maybe a month to a month and a half to go from 9 kilometers to 42. Wish me luck!

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