Over the past 8 weeks I’ve been ramping up my distances to train for my first marathon. Since my last half marathon, where I completed the race in my goal time. I set myself the challenge of my first marathon. Training for the run has been a bigger challenge than I anticipated with the extra mileage each week becoming extremely hard. The increase each week has felt larger than I expected and it’s made the idea of running 42.2km very challenging.
My longest run so far has been 34.2km which is 8km short of the distance required on the day. Being 3 weeks out, I have the choice of either continuing to increase to 36/37km this week or start to taper early to help ensure my body is feeling great on the day. So far I’ve been fortunate that I haven’t had any injuries so far. However my legs are feeling heavy during runs and post run recovery is taking longer each week. My body is giving me signs that it’s time to pull back and start an early taper!
Given the increasing mental prospect of completing a marathon, time is getting pushed further to the back of my mind. I had a goal 8 weeks ago to complete the run in 3 hours 15 minutes. However at this stage, the goal is completing the run regardless of the time! Given that I have 3 weeks of tapering up my sleeve, the plan is not to pull back to much but rather focus a lot more on speed work and recovery runs rather than very long runs.
