Now What?

Between periods of sleeping, coughing and blowing my nose this weekend, I've been thinking a lot about "Now what?" I never made it to Saturday's run. There is no doubt that it was the right choice. I could barely manage the stairs without wiping out. Yet, the question of how to adjust my schedule plagued most of my waking moments over the weekend. With no where to go and Dave doing softball most of both Saturday and Sunday I had little to distract me from obsessing about fixing my marathon training. Thank goodness for Temple and Lasalle basketball on Sunday. That helped!

Congrats to both teams, by the way. Temple lost but really gave it a good show. Now it's everyone in Philly behind Lasalle! Go Big Five!

Back to marathon training. See? I've got a maddeningly one track mind until May 26th. I've decided to do as much of my original schedule as I can this week. I plan to go for time or planned miles whichever happens first. Tuesday's schedule calls for 8 miles. At an average 12 minute mile that's 96 minutes so I'll be out for 96 minutes running or walking OR 8 miles whichever comes first. Thursday's runs are always for time anyway and this week it's 30 minutes (instead of the usual 60 because of the planned long long run on Saturday). On Saturday, I'll go for 20 miles or 4 hours whichever comes first. Unless I completely fail at running on Saturday I'll simply pick up the schedule from there and keep going. I'm not sure what ratio of running and walking - or what mileage I achieve - will constitute fail on Saturday. It's going to be a 'how do I feel' thing after the day is done.

Just in case, so that I can concentrate on Saturday's activities and not obsess the whole time about what happens if..... I've also reworked my schedule. In the event that I don't feel accomplished after Saturday I reworked the 20+ milers so that I'll do 20 on 4/6 and 22 on 4/13 and stick to the original schedule after that. If it comes to that then the weekdays in between 4/6 and 4/13 will be minimal running so that I can recover. It won't be easy to do two long Saturdays in a row like that but I don't think it's impossible either especially if I'm careful during the week.

I also removed my week off in May. I will not be running that weekend because I'll be out of town on Thursday eveneing through Saturday evening but I put some of the weekday workouts back in. I don't want to take a chance with getting sick again and missing two weeks of workouts.

Gotta be flexible and I have to keep believing. I still go to bed every night imagining myself running the marathon and crossing the finish line.