Vermont City Marathon Training – Week 3

Running is 90% mental and 10% physical. After this week, I know I have to focus on the positives of my training and just breathe and let it go when I face a setback, or have a run that doesn’t go as well as planned. When you get hung up on what went wrong, it’s easy for that to become the norm. (I shared this article on Friday, about how you can retrain your thoughts and mindset to be more positive overall – so fascinating.)

Current Goal: 

Let’s just review last week’s goal – to run my long run with negative splits. Didn’t happen. In fact, that’s one of many, many reasons I got in my own head (read: in my own way) during my long run this week. My goal for this week is to run my cut-back 10 mile long run slightly faster overall than I did two weeks ago. Even if it’s just a second off the total pace! (Can you tell I’m really trying to give myself something I can succeed at, for a little lift here?)

Long Run:

In case you didn’t see it on Instagram, I had a big old pity party after my long run this week. And then it got worse when I realized I had chafed, badly. I don’t know if it’s because it was rainy, or just that it was a long run, but let’s just say putting on my sports bra again required bacitracin, KT tape and a lot of sucking it up. 

It was pretty warm when I went out, but an icy drizzle made it not as pleasant as it could have been. I went out deciding to not worry about looking at the pace, to start conservatively and gradually increase my speed by feel, so I could negative split each mile. The first mile was okay, I felt pretty loose and happy to be running. Then I made the mistake of looking at my watch for the split and it was very slow. If I was thinking straight, I would have been happy about that – the slower you start, the more chance you have of negative splits. But I just got in my head – I’m slow, I’m out of shape, I felt like I was running faster than that, I have eleven more miles to go. I was my own worst enemy.

I really did try to turn it around. I started telling myself how lucky I was to be running in February in Vermont outside, no gloves, no neck warmer, no frozen toes, no treadmill. I started looking forward to mile 3, when I would get to Lake Champlain and see the peaceful, watercolor views. I smiled at people I passed. Then I realized I’d taken a wrong turn and had to backtrack. Which meant my simple out and back now required me to do mileage math to know when to turn around after my detour so I would definitely get my 12 finished somewhere near where I lived. (Ugh, mileage math, right?) Then I looked at my watch and realized it had stopped at some point. And then? Then it was just a slog. 

But you know what, I did it. It may not have been pretty and it may not have been fast, but the splits weren’t all that terrible and I have a good solid workout under my running belt for the week.

Speed Workout:

I ran a great fartlek run this week, with a warm up mile, two miles of unstructured speed intervals, a mile cool down and a few strides at the end. It felt amazing. I’m remembering what a huge confidence boost it is to nail a speed workout.

Regular Run:

Two regular runs this week! One just over six miles, and another short recovery run on my birthday, to loosen up after my Thursday long run.

Running fuel! 

Other Workouts:

Oh hello, yoga! It’s been a while. Don’t get me wrong, there’s often a sun salutation or quick flow sprinkled here or there in my week, but this week I managed one online yoga class on Grokker, as well as a lovely Vinyasa class at a studio on my birthday. Lots of heart openers and hip openers and some gorgeous twisting.

I also did a quick abs workout with Baby T using the Baby Strong cards. After my speedwork run this week, I realized my abs were sore afterward and took it as a sign that I need to work that area more often. 

Notes From the Week:

I’m almost embarrassed to say, given my relatively low weekly mileage for training, that I’m glad next week is a cut-back week on my program. Finding the time for regular short workouts is hard enough, and when you start running much longer long runs? It’s tough. But if it wasn’t hard, would it be as rewarding? If you don’t have passion for something, you’ll never want it bad enough to work hard and sacrifice for it. 

Weekly Mileage:

28.31 miles

Total Mileage:

68.06 miles

What drives you? Passion? Goals? Something else?

What do you do for chafing after the fact? I googled it and everything said, ‘Just don’t run for a while!’ which isn’t helpful at all. Would love to hear any advice or tips in case it happens again!