Something new

I've been taking it pretty easy since the 12 hour in mid-August.  With October just about here it's time to get back into a regular training schedule.  The new I indicate in the blog title is I've decided to add a significant amount of walking to my training.  There are are a couple of reasons for that.

1)  My next goal race is Across the Years 48 Hour.  Last year I ended up running (with some walking mixed in) for about 45 miles and full on walking for about 61 miles.  That's a lot of walking! While I hope to best my mileage from last year, I know there will again be a lot of walking involved.  So I figure I better train to walk!

 2)  The other reason is race strategy I'm considering for the race.  Rather than start out running and end up having to walk.  I want to start out walking and conserving my energy with the hopes of picking it up later in the race.  

So my general training plan is to walk twice and run twice mid-week and then on the weekends walk long one day and run long the other.  My goal is to be able to comfortably sustain a 14-15 minute pace for the long haul.  I can walk faster than that, but in the race, walking as fast as possible isn't the primary goal.   Last weekend I completed 13.1 miles at a 13:55 pace.  The first 6 miles were in the 14 min/mile range and the last 7 miles were in the 13 min/mile range with the fastest being 13:08.  This week I'm planning on walking (or hiking) 14-15 miles and then next week I already have a 20 mile training walk planned with a friend who walks in the 13:30-14 min/mile range.  I'm registered for the Ghost of Seattle marathon in November and plan to walk it, ideally under 6-1/2 hours.  I'm thinking about registering for the Seattle marathon too, maybe to walk it too, but perhaps to run it.  I'll decide on that in the next few weeks.

Don't worry I've been running  --- my last long run was a 20 miler the weekend before last on Wildwood.   But this past weekend I skipped doing a long run because the family ran a local 5k to benefit some neighborhood schools.  Can I just say that 5k's are hard!   The 5k we ran earlier this summer wasn't a very good experience for the little guy, so to motivate him I gave him a challenge.  The slowest in the family had to buy the family dinner.  Of course we knew that Marc would smoke us (which he did) so the real competition was between the LG and me.  Between you and me, I planned to let him win, but of course there was the distinct possibility he would win without any sandbagging from me.

I don't think I have a fast twitch muscle left in my body, but we still all placed pretty well.  Marc came in 2nd in his AG (55-59) with a time of 21:47 and 26/124 men and 6/54 mens masters.  Looking at all the other age groups, he would have come in 2nd or 3rd all the way down to the 25-29 AG.  I came in 3rd in my AG (45-49) with a time of 28:16 (slow!) and 30/166 women and 8/62 masters women.  The LG was 4th in his AG (so didn't get a ribbon) and 70/124 men, but his time of 27:35 beat me!  None of us ran a PR, but we all had a great time.  And I really need to get out and do some tempo runs.  It's a sad day if I can't average under 9 min pace for a 5k!  And I guess I'm buying dinner. :-)