Mileage comparisons

Double click the image — it’ll give you a readable version. The “week” column is weeks until race day. So, week 1 is the week before the marathon. I don’t count the week of, since I don’t count mileage then & instead basically just do whatever makes the legs feel good. I’m currently on “week 6” on this. So, the rest of the week 5 and up are my goal training miles for this cycle. And just to note, times for each were: Fargo 2009: 2:58.15, Des Moines 2009 2:55.53, and my goal for Fargo 2010 is sub 2:52.

My legs have had a harder time recovering during this marathon cycle than I remember from the others. Nate suggested it was because I’m doing more consistent mileage — that during Des Moines I was up and down a lot more (because of injuries, sickness, etc), and so far for Fargo I’ve been at a higher mileage level for a longer time.

So, decided to take a look. I was surprised to see my weekly totals for Des Moines. Guess I thought I put in bigger weeks before that marathon? First, my 100 mile week was pretty far out from the marathon. Maybe that was because I was supposed to hit 100 a couple of times, this was just the first — I can’t remember. I was injured shortly after that big week, so the following weeks really suffered. In the month that followed the 100, I only averaged 42/week.

Another reason for tired legs this cycle is that I didn’t have as good of a base as I did before Des Moines. For Des Moines, I had been training since the previous March. For Fargo now, I did a few bigger weeks during the winter, but didn’t turn over to full-time running until after the Birkie (beginning of March). So, hopefully it’ll just take a little while & my legs will get stronger & start recovering a little quicker.

Hopefully putting more mileage into that “meat and potatoes” part of the training cycle will really help. I haven’t been very high yet — averagining 66mpw the last month, but I’ll bump that up closer to 90 in the next few weeks. I was hoping that the 66 average would be higher, but I guess that’s a good number. It’s coming off of a ski season, and the first 3 weeks of that I had to take 1 day off a week just to recover. The recovery days I needed to do fewer miles just to allow them to recover as well. There’s no way they would have recovered from a 9 mile day (which was my “easy” day this week).

So, interesting, for what it’s worth. Doesn’t tell me a lot, other than I need to keep up the training for the next 6.5 weeks!