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June 12, 2005
bad day for satellites
Boy, have I ever been slack about blogging. For the past few weeks I've either been running a lot, working a lot, or both, or neither (spent all Memorial Day weekend installing silly Oracle on this silly linux box, for example). During many of my runs I've composed blog entries that never got written. But all that is changed now :-)
I recently made a sorta-big decision to go coachless while training for Baltimore. I thought about joining a club closer to home (my current club is in the next county), and I thought about signing up with a reputable outfit like this one, but in the end I decided to give the Pfitzinger 18-week 70+mpw plan a shot. If I do well in Baltimore (and think I can do better still), maybe I'll reward myself by signing up with a real coach. But for this marathon it will just be me and Coach P.
Since Baltimore is on a Saturday, my training weeks are a little turned around. I started the Pfitzinger plan this morning with a 17-miler. One of the (many) differences between this plan and the kind of training my running-club coach espoused is attention to pace as well as distance. Pfitzinger doesn't get anal-to-the-second about pace but he does seem to recommend ranges, which is 180 degrees from what I've been doing for the last 2-1/2 years. Anyway, today I set out to do the first 5 at whatever pace, the second 5 @ 8:30 - 8:50, and the rest heading toward 8min pace. I am a terrible judge of pace but I was confident my GPS would help keep me out of trouble. The GPS died after 3 miles. I borrowed my husband's but it would not hold a satellite signal for more than a mile or two at a time. So on the very day I was supposed to start thinking about pace in more than an offhand way, I found myself running god-knows-how-long at god-knows-how-fast. In the end I think I got 17.5 miles at 8:03 pace. Not an auspicious beginning.
Posted by joe positive at June 12, 2005 4:41 PM
Comments
Are you from Baltimore?
Posted by: Jason at June 12, 2005 11:20 PM
Nope, not from Baltimore, just running the marathon there in October.
Posted by: joe positive at June 13, 2005 7:51 AM