Week 7-- Slow and Fast

Despite the traveling to DC this week I had a decent week of training. I got 23 total miles in running with about 10-15 miles of walking in DC and at the convention center. Lots of the miles were long slow distance, which was good.

I also did 4 Yasso 800's as speed work on Sunday, in times of 5:40, 5:32, 5:34, 5:35 with a mile warmup and half mile cool down. Bart Yasso a long time senior manager for Runner's World Magazine and runner of 100's of marathons invented this workout. The thinking is that a few weeks before the Marathon you do 10 x 800 at a steady sustainable pace with a small spread in the time. This would be your projected marathon time based on your fitness, so if I were capable of running 10 of these (I am not right now) with a about a 2 minute break in between them, my likely finish time would be in the range of a 5:30 to 5:40 marathon.

So on to week 8 which is slightly altered, I am going to bring my tempo run up to Tuesday, since I have a speaking engagement in Barrington at 8am in the morning on Wednesday, its also a 13.1 run on the weekend, that I call test race. I am going to mimic all the fueling and the hydration needs as well as the clothing choices I have for the marathon. Testing out a few different outfits depending on race day weather, so I can follow the old adage "nothing new on race day".

Week 8 will have 27 miles of running, which will be my biggest week yet in terms of volume, but still in line with no more then a 15% increase in mileage from week to week.