Treadmill miles – so boring, but it’s either that or debilitating heat!

The clock is ticking, counting down that I only have 42 days until the marathon! The good news is that I feel like I am ready. The bad news is that I want to be more ready, and so I’ll keep training as hard as I can to get me to the start line. Here is what I did last week:

Sunday: Cross training. Softball practice and some light aqua jogging in the pool.

Monday: Rest day. I think that honouring rest days will be even more critical the closer I get to 10/25. I really enjoy rest days, actually.

Tuesday: 5.25 miles, hill intervals level 1 at 6.4 mph. I felt good today, and thought it would be smart to start adding some small hills in my mix (on the treadmill, as Cayman is flat as a pancake), so I can be ready for the couple small hills that I will face.

Even though I ran inside on Wednesday, it was too beautiful of a day to not stretch outside afterwards!

Wednesday: 8.1 miles, 6.6 mph pace. Yeah, baby! This is what I hope to run for the full (well, my ambitious goal is to run this fast for four hours)! Not too bad of a feeling, but I’ll tell you, when you start to project whether you can maintain that pace, it really brings up a lot of both positive and negative chatter in your head. On one hand, you are sure you can do it. On the other, you feel like you might be too optimistic and there is no way possible you can maintain this pace. All I know is that it will be uncharted territory when I get to 10/25, and all I can do is relax and try to be my best – because I do have the training behind me to make it happen.

Thursday: 5.1 mi, hill intervals level 1 at 6.4 mph. OK, this was a repeat of Tuesday, but I feel like I need to address this a bit in the coming weeks. There are some small-ish hills in the first three miles of MCM, and then probably the biggest hill on the face of the earth at mile 26 (not really, but I’m guessing that after running 26 miles, it will feel more like Mt Everest than a rather small incline). So I need to be somewhat ready for these.

Reppin’ Team Patrick on Thursday! Raising awareness for Lewy Body Dementia.

Friday: Rest day with a special 2.8 mi beach walk to end the day.

Saturday: A recovery week 13.1 miles. I am truly in the home stretch of this training, as my long runs each week now alternate (18 mi last week, 13 this week, 19 next week, 12 after, then 20 mi before tapering). I never thought I would be so excited about a ‘short’ 13 mi run in my life; nor did I ever consider 13 miles to be a recovery run. Maybe up is now down and right is left? Whatever it is, I’m digging it! I’ll be ready for next week’s monster 19 miles – a distance I have only done once before, and it was on a treadmill.

TOTAL MILES: 31.55 running miles