6:08

That's right, I am only three weeks away from the marathon, and I am feeling pretty good about it. I will have one more strong week of running before I start my two week taper, so next week will consist of runs on Monday (5), Tuesday (5) and Wednesday (8) and then a long run on 20 miles on Friday, for a 38 mile week. I am having to change up my schedule a bit because I will be traveling on Saturday to have Thanksgiving with my family. I work in retail, so Thanksgiving can be a bit tricky.

I have also found that my long runs go better if I do them every two weeks. Last weekend I did an 18 miler in just over 3 hours. I was unable to get an ice bath afterwards and I really felt like I had a hard time recovering from it. All week I felt sore and sluggish. I am not sure if missing an ice bath after my long run was the cause or not, but I felt like this weekend I should maybe not hit the long run.

So today I slept in till 8:15 AM!!  I know! It has been awhile since I slept that late in my bed. Anyways, I did get up and went for a run today. I was hoping to get in a 90 minute run. I had no route planned out or anything, I just wanted to go running. I also wanted to try some new things to see if it would help me run better. I know it is really late in the game to be trying something new, but I went for it anyways.

I wanted to try the Galloway method. Now to be fair, I have not read the book or anything, I just wanted to look at running 10 minutes and walking 1 minute. I know others that do a 5:1 method, but I figured a 10:1 would be good for me. It wasn't. I did not really like it and wanted to keep running. So I figured I would try something else, and there is no scientific evidence behind this, just something I came up with.

I used my HR monitor to gauge my effort. Once my HR got to 160, then I would walk until it got back down to the 130's (Again, these are numbers I just came up with). This seemed to work well, but the further I got into my run, the more it seemed I would hit the 160, so that is not going to work.

So, I think the easiest thing for me to do will be to look at the marathon as a bunch of 5k's. If I can complete each of these 5K's in under 30 minutes, I should be under the 4:30 mark, which would be huge, considering last year was 6:08. I know under 4:30 will be tough, but I am definitely expecting under 5 hours for sure!