Weeks 6-8

Week 6
4, 5, 4, 11
I completed all 4 runs as planned and started seeing my run times coming down. Most of that is related to the weather cooling down.

Week 7
4, 6, 4, 12
I only did the middle runs of 6 and 4 this week. The first run did not happen due to physical illness. The long run did not happen since I chose to spend the day volunteering at Jamestown. Every weekend there is something going on that I would like to be involved in. However, this was the last one that I will do until after the marathon. It is to the point where the prep, run, and recovery are taking more than 4 hours and that is only going to get longer. Plus I tend to be sore/tired for the rest of the day. Therefore I cannot schedule anything on the same day and it would be best not to wear myself out the day before and risk not completing the run.

Another challenge that I started to face this week is the darkness in the mornings. Getting out of my soft bed is hard enough on its own, but when it is still dark out I want to obey my instincts and sleep. For the 6 mile run I ended up doing it during my lunch break at work (yes we have a shower there) so that I didn't need to do half the run in the dark. I did do the 4 mile run while the sun was still coming up.

Week 8
4, 6, 4, 14
This week I only managed the medium and a long run. On both of the short runs I was ill - though with different things. In addition, my long run ended up only being 10 miles since I was still recovering and didn't want to push my body so hard that I relapsed.

To follow up on the darkness issue, I did both of my runs this week well after the sun was up. Though my medium run was after work and I ended up facing the opposite problem where the sun was actually already setting. I chose to do that run through campus since I know it is well lit and figured there would be a few students out. Wow... there were a LOT of students out to the point where running on the sidewalk was actually somewhat difficult to weave in and out of them.

Next Week
4, 7, 4, 16
Those are the mileages put forth by the book and the 16 miles is the first of 3 weeks at that distance. Given that I haven't done more than 11 miles (on purpose), I think for this week I will try to do 13 miles, the following week do 15, and the one after that get up to the 16. I will still do the appropriate short & medium runs.