Chicago Marathon Training - Recap

In light of the celebrity deaths of the last week I feel I should dust off my blog to let people know that I'm still here. The last few weeks have been incredibly busy but I've managed to continue my marathon training to the best of my abilities. P90x however has been chosen as the sacrificial lamb of my schedule.

The core issue with my time suddenly vanishing is that I picked up some side work for a company I know and that has been consuming my nights. Where I would normally be dozing off around 10-11 I'm now up till 1-2 banging out code for money and it makes waking up early impossible. I did it for 2 days before I was so worn out I could barely function. I could maybe find a way to fit the training in somewhere but with running my main focus now I'm just going to cut back on the amount of open time commitments I have outstanding right now in favor of sanity. This project will likely only last a couple more weeks and when it's done I'll look at picking up elements of P90x again. I don't believe I'll be able to do a full routine until after my marathon but I can likely do strength training of the off days.

Running has been going well. My weekday runs are going as planned and while I haven't been able to hit every run perfectly I've done almost all of them or done the best I could on the ones I did. Two weekends ago I was suppossed to run 7 miles but I could only get 2.5 miles in the morning before the heat stopped me and then I only got 5 miles that night before fatigue stopped me. That's a combined 7 miles, but I still wish I had done that distance non-stop. Last weekend cut back to 5 miles and I finished that without issue and it was one of my best runs ever.

This week is 3 mile Tuesday, 4 miles Wednesday, 3 miles Thursday, 9 miles on Saturday. 9 miles!. I really really am intimidated by this distance. I haven't ran anything farther ever in one continual run thatn 6.5 miles or so. I'm desperately hoping that I can complete this run without walking and "on pace" because I think if I can it'll be the exact thing I need to motivate me to keep going. If I'm not able to do it or have to start walking at 5-6 miles I'm worried that it's going to discourage me into the "if I can't do this what makes me think I can do that" mentality. I mean afterall it does only get harder every week.

I'm trying not to let negative thoughts into my head so we'll see where I end up.

Eating has been poor the last week or so. Not sure why I went off the page so much but I did. I haven't got on the scale but the last time I did I was down to 230.5 so we'll see where that number is on Friday when I weigh in again. Maybe I'll weigh in Saturday post-run to see what that's like.

Things are well overall and I'm going to attempt to revive my blog. I'm going to wish I had blog entries for all my runs in the future so I need to get back on the wagon.