vegandurance

Marathon Training…home stretch!

I have been a busy busy lady the past few weeks, with hours increasing at all my part-time jobs and the marathon looming closer and closer.  I’ve also cooked up a lot of yummies and promise that I will post some of the recipes soon!  Hopefully they can inspire some of you to try out something new in the kitchen, especially with Thanksgiving coming up tomorrow (November is flying by!).

Here is a quick snapshot of marathon training from the past few weeks:

Week of 10/29 — 31.35 miles run total with 12.28-mile long run

Week of 11/5 — 44.19 miles run total with 20.18-mile long run

Week of 11/12 — 25.7 miles run total with 12.42-mile long run

From the looks of this, I dropped off into taper mode pretty quickly :)  This isn’t totally true, though, as I attended the official 3-day training this past weekend for getting certified to teach Xercise Lab.  I have also been teaching spin, core blast, and team-teaching Xercise Lab pretty intensively.  Hoping to take time off of certain jobs next week to really get rested up and keep those legs fresh.

Some kinks I need to work out before the race:
- My right hip has been bothering me a little bit :(  It’s not as bad now that I’ve scaled back on miles, but I guess all the running and high-impact activity makes for some stiffness and imbalances.  I’ve been trying to be good about foam rolling as much as possible, using a tennis ball to really get in those tight spots, stretching, and have a light sports massage booked.  Let’s hope this gets nipped in the next few days!
- I am just recovering from a strange, not-fully-diagnosed stomach bug of sorts.  My stomach wasn’t necessarily feeling that bad, but I was having waves of nausea and trouble digesting/going “regularly” this past week.  I’m not sure if it was poorly-time nutrition, food gone bad, or something else, but it’s mostly gone now and hopefully sickness karma will have pity on me come race day!
- I’m still not totally sure what pants/shorts I’m going to wear on race day.  I was initially hoping to wear my light compression leggings, but on the 20-miler, they started to give me this nasty chaffe/bruise by my ankle!  Ugh, it’s frustrating how many little discomforts you notice when you’ve been running 2.5+ hours.  I might switch to regular leggings, or my other distance proof combo: my black shorts and compression leggings or long socks.  The main concern with the latter is the temperature on race day, but maybe it will feel fine like it has on recent morning training runs.
- To bring music or no?? I’m not a huge fan of running races with music, and have run many awesome long runs without.  However, I have also run quite a few with…and on my recent half-marathons, I believe it helped on the home stretch.  I will likely bring my iPod in a pouch for the race, and only whip it out if I really need a pick me up.  We shall see.

Turkey Trot 5k with some friends tomorrow!  Probably won’t go all out, but it should be a fun way to squeeze in some tempo miles :)