Tempo Town

The end stretch of training. What a struggle to get through this winter trained and motivated. Tomorrow it will be one month until the race. Not a lot of time to get anything done. What's done is done. I am working on the coordination phase of my training now. These involve tempo runs. Eric and I went out to do our tempo run Tuesday. Wouldn't it figure, we woke to thick sticky snow falling out of the sky. The plan to run on the airport was nixed after we figured out our parking spot was the snowplow turn-around. We therefore ran on County Road (our normal 1/2 mile speed lane). We chose to run the tempo run on the speed courses so we could each run individual workouts yet do our warmup and cooldown together. The road was covered with about an inch of snow and getting a pace going was extremely difficult. My hope for 3 miles @ 6:40 / 3 @ 6:00 / 3 @ 6:40 was not possible. Instead I got in something more like 3 @ 7:20 / 3 @ 6:45 / 3 @ 7:11. It felt good to this type of workout but I was nervous about it.

Yesterday was a 5 mile recovery and today was two 5 mile recoveries (one in the AM and the other at noon w/Marc). Both felt good. Tomorrow - back to the airport for more tempo running. Here's hoping for good weather.

Marc is back at it after running the B&A marathon in Maryland two weeks ago. Didn't make his Boston qualifying goal, but managed to smash his PR of 3:49 with a new 3:32. He is thinking of doing another right off (May) and then cooling his marathon heels until Spring '06. Says he wants to focus on the short & fast for the summer. He is undecided on if this post marathon plan is a go. He's indicated he's battling common sense and having a hard time overcoming it.

Ah, warm weather the last 2 days. Morning runs at 32 F. Now this is nice!