Marathon in t-minus 19 weeks

Wow...I haven't posted in weeks and today I'm posting twice!

I decided late last year that since I was turning 30 this year, that I'd like to run a marathon to prove to myself that I'm still in somewhat decent shape, or at least that I have the ability to get in shape if needed. As motivation, I asked my brother Sean if he'd like to do the marathon with me. He said that he had been thinking of doing a full marathon this year since he did a half marathon last year so he was in.

With that motivation in place, I next had to figure out how to go about the training. I knew that my friend Steve had run a marathon last year, so I asked him what he did for training. He gladly sent me a link to Hal Higdon's Marathon Training Guide which he used last year. He also told me that he trained using the Intermediate I schedule. He also happened to mention that his time for the marathon was 3:46.49 so that answered my next question - what time to strive for. I mean come on...I'm not about to be shown up by Steve! ;)

I got off to quite a rough start. Keep in mind that I haven't been doing anything to keep in shape for about a year, if not more. I decided that I'd try to follow the Intermediate I program, just like Steve did in hopes of duplicating his time.

Bad idea!

I managed to complete the 3 miles on Tuesday (with some difficulty), and the 5 miles on Wednesday (with some more difficulty), and even the 3 miles on Thursday (again with some difficulty) but that's where the Intermediate I program came to an end for me. Saturday was the day of my 30th birthday party and I didn't really feel like running. I was supposed to do 5 miles at marathon pace (which I worked out to be 7 miles an hour for the time I wanted) on Saturday and then 8 miles on Sunday. Suffice it to say that I didn't feel much like running on Sunday either.

After resigning myself to the fact that I was NOT an intermediate runner - not after a year or more of doing nothing anyway - I decided that I'd switch to the Novice program and start over. It's an 18 week program, just like the Intermediate program, but it starts off much slower.

After completing week 1 of the program (3-Tues, 3-Wed, 3-Thurs, 6 -Saturday) without too much trouble, I'm feeling much better now about my chances of actually pulling off this marathon thing. I'm sure the three days that I put in of the intermediate program probably helped me somewhat so it's good to know that that wasn't a total loss. The other thing I've got going for me is that this is an 18 week program and there is still 19 weeks before the marathon and I've already completed week 1. I'll work out what to do with those extra 2 weeks later.

Anyways, I figured I'd keep track of my marathon training just like I did with my flight training. We'll see how it goes.