Tough week

Murphy's law worked against me this week. After many years never seeing a dentist, my wife booked me an appointment for a checkup in Feb. Within days I developed a wisdom tooth infection.

To make matters worse I ignored all the physiological signs - higher resting HR, higher HR at slow pace, pain and feeling like crap, - and ran a hard hill session on Thursday. Needless to say I got worse. I needed 2 days off running entirely and then a very gentle hour on Sunday.

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of it was a good hard look at my training plan for the marathon. i've been reading plenty of stuff on the web about exercise physiology and training plans, so needed to put this into place.

I believe in a flexible plan with some underlying key sessions that must be included. No point doing a specific session on a specific day if you aren't up to it.

The other issue is how to slot in races (and how many) when long runs are being missed. i dont want to run in races slowly - no point, but they help the motivation. Nonetheless i know at my level long runs are far more important than fast runs.

Anyway, my key principles are :

1. Long runs - Sundays, varying my long runs between classic long slow runs one week, with 4x35k+ runs second half of prog. , alternating with increasing length marathon pace runs - up to 25km or so. I realised that I dont do enough runs at my planned marathon pace. Hopefully getting a Garmin305 will help me achieve this.

4-5 races will fill in the other sundays, replacing the MP runs rather than long slow runs. last race will be freo HM, 3 weeks pre Marathon

2. Midweek 90 min run - to increase total mileage

3. Only one high intensity pace session a week - intervals or hills, and make them long ones rather than short, at a pace never faster than 5k pace, so as not to take too much out of me and pay later

4. Other mileage recovery, slow runs, lactate theshold. To peak about 90km/week.

18 weeks is the plan, prior to this (next few weeks) I'll do some harder, shorter work and set a 10k time (43-44min).

My first race of the year - Christchurch 12k, 53min21sec - under my planned 4min30pace. Evenly paced 26:43 out, 26:38 back on a pleasantly undulating course through Claremont, Dalkeith and Nedlands.

This came on the back of a quiet training week, due to the signs of a viral infection and the aches of increasing my mileage in the first 2 weeks of Jan to 60+ kms each, as well as the intensity with some speed and hill work.

Sat night was a Bucks Party, relatively well behaved I had about 6 stubbies ( mild hangover) - so all in all I'm pretty happy with the performance.

I'd like to think over the next 4 months I can gradually reduce my 10k time each race, heading towards the 40min mark, although probably a bit hopeful to get under it. Then I'll concentrate on endurance, sub 1hr40 half, then sub 3:30 marathon in July. Finally City to Surf in August in under 50min for 12k.

My long term (over years) goal is sub3hour marathon, a standard I feel would qualify me as a good runner. After that... well lets just see how things go for now.

Not sure how often I'll be posting, or what information.