Week 1

Week 1 of my marathon training is in the books and I'm feeling really good. I ran the treadmill on Tuesday thru Thursday with a 3, 5 and 4 mile run. I finished them all really easy with plenty of wind left. I went on our Saturday for a 3 mile run but the culmination of the week was this morning.

I ran this course:

My house to Cele.

My goal was 8 miles. I thought it was around 4.2 miles to Cele but it is actually 4.77 so I ran around 9 miles instead of 8. My usual course is a big loop which totals 7 miles so I had to add a few jigs to it to get up to 8. As I passed the road to Cele, there was a nice big hill out there just calling my name. I found it too much to resist so decided to break out of my routine route and do something new. It turned out to be an excellent decision. I didn't take off till about 9:30 and the temperature was perfect. The sky was crystal clear, the countryside was beautiful, it was an excellent run all around. I adjusted my pace to be a bit slower than normal according to the instuctions in the training pages so I finished 9 miles with plenty of wind left. My legs and hips were pretty tight when I finished but that's part of it, getting my body used to running long distances.

I had my doubts when I started this whole thing about being able to make a very long run but this mornings performance really pumped my up. Of course, 9 miles isn't even close to 26 but I'll get there if I can stay healthy.