Change of Pace

When I was training for my sub-3 marathon last year, I graphed out my mileage in an excel file and it was a thing of beauty. A graceful, relentless crest of miles, punctuated by negative recovery spikes every three weeks when my mileage plunged by as much as half...ascending and ascending until in crashed into the taper and spat out my beautiful and much-coveted marathon time beginning in the number two.

This past Spring I had begun to ride another wave of miles with far-fetched dreams of fall marathon trials qualification dancing in my head before being prematurely ejected from the ride by a tumble involving a year-old puppy, a inauspiciously placed tree root and a nest of fire ants. The fire ants didn't really affect my training, but they did add some painfully itchy insult to injury.

So here I am six months later perched on a jagged base of haphazard, inconsistent workouts and I'm hankering to build another pretty graph of miles. I just went over 40 last week for the first time in a while, so I think I'll hang out here for a few weeks to wake my body up to what's about to happen. After that the line starts slanting upward and with any luck will crash to shore in Boston next April.

Goals? Just to throw them out there:

• Build a base of 60 miles/week by the end of the year.
• Get in enough speed work to improve my fitness to where I can break 40 in an early December 10K
• A 16-week training cycle beginning the last week in December
• Consistent track workouts...get my mile repeats down below 6
• Break 3 again in Boston, ideally PR, take advantage of the fact that all the really fast girls will be racing the day before!