Marathon Monday: Week 9 and I'm Feeling Fine

I have officially completed Week 9 of my marathon training plan, which means that I am halfway done! What! It's amazing [and terrifying] that I'm halfway to my first marathon.

Monday was a cross training day. I almost always play racquetball on Mondays, but I decided to also bike to the gym to get a little extra cross training in for the day. I biked 8.3 miles in 31 minutes, played racquetball for about 50 minutes, and then biked home [only 1.5 miles].

Tuesday was a 4 mile run. I have been feeling so slow, that I just wanted to go faster. I know the importance of going slow during the majority of your runs, but I figured one quick run wouldn't be the end of the world. I held a 9:45 pace for 4.05 miles, finishing in 39:35. This isn't even THAT much faster than normal, but it felt good to get my HR up and to really feel like I was challenging myself.

Nova staring at me while I was stretching after my run

Wednesday was a 5 mile run. This is significantly shorter than it has been, since this was a cutback week. I went out in the morning and ended up with 5 miles at a 10:14 pace.

Thursday was another 4 miler, and I tried to keep it easy so it could feel like a true recovery run. I ended up with 4.1 miles at 10:47 pace. Thursday evening my friend had a peach party (she had bought 50 lbs of peaches, what!). We made peach muffins, peach pie, and peach margaritas. All delicious. :)

Only some of the peaches we used that night

Friday was a rest day, and I did almost nothing. However, we did drive to my parents' house to watch the Olympics opening ceremonies with them, which was fun. I love the Olympics so much! My favorite events are diving (I was a diver in high school), swimming (I also swam in high school), track & field (specifically the marathon), and gymnastics. I don't even care which event is on though, I will watch it.

Saturday was an 8 mile pace run. I was a little nervous about this since I haven't done a pace run over 5 miles in a really long time. I was going to run out in the country at my parents' house, but I'm not a huge fan of country runs (you typically get a lot of wind), so I waited until we got home. I ended up doing 7 miles at 10:00 pace, and then a cool down mile at 10:47. This run really knocked me out, both my legs and my lungs, but I was happy to get it done. I am trying to run pace runs around 10:00 pace, but I do not think there is any way that I will actually run that pace in the marathon. It just feels so hard even for 7 miles!

Splits for my pace run

Sunday was a long run; I had 13 miles on the schedule. I went to bed really early on Saturday night--around 10 pm, which is about 2 hours earlier than usual for me. I wanted to get up at 6:30 and get going on the long run before it got too hot/sunny outside. Apparently, my body really wanted to sleep, because I turned off my alarm when it went off in the morning and I ended up waking up at 8:30. :-| I considered moving my run to the evening, but I checked the weather and it was still rather cool, so I decided to go asap. I ate a piece of toast with peanut butter and banana, waited about 45 minutes while I drank some water and caught up on Olympics info :), and then I was off. I decided to try eating chocolate as my fuel during my run, and left strawberries in the mailbox to get around mile 7. My legs were dead at the beginning from the run the day before, but they started to feel a little better around mile 4. When I got back to the house and had strawberries and water at mile 7, I was feeling pretty good. I kept it slow until mile 10, and then I let myself speed up a little bit. Overall, I had an average time of 10:47/mile, and felt good to the end, which was great after my rough run last week.

Overall I had 34.3 miles for the week, and felt good. I'm starting to feel like this weekly mileage is normal, which is good because it is just going to keep going up in the upcoming weeks.

Are you a fan of the Olympics? What are your favorite events?