Marathon training plan #3 complete

Graph of average pace during my Boogie Nights Marathon training plan

Almost immediately after my last marathon was completed, the Blue Ridge Marathon, back in April I jumped right into a new training plan for the Boogie Marathon. Seven weeks later I have completed that training plan and tomorrow I will be running the marathon. This training plan was different from the other two I completed in that I had an abbreviated schedule to work with. Instead of at least 16 weeks in between events to prepare, I only had seven weeks. That meant a lot of work to customize a training plan and I had to compress stuff, like the taper period, to make it all fit. On the flip side, I expected I should still be in pretty good shape after coming off two marathons and around 35 or more straight weeks of training. So it is time to look back and see how things went.



As far as what was accomplished, the training plan covered 7 weeks with a total of 30 runs and I burned right at 28,000 calories in covering 229 miles. I had two runs where I struggled to complete the session and resorted to having to walk a portion. One was very early in the plan and I think was due to not having fully recovered from the Blue Ridge Marathon - basically, I was trying to do too much, too soon. The other one was later in the plan and I think it was due to some challenges leading up to the run - missed meals, etc.

The good news from all of this was that I managed to average a pace of 8:54 min/mile across all the runs. That is a good improvement over the 9:19 I averaged for the previous training plan. The bad news is shown by the trendline where it can be seen that I was actually trending slower. Even if I excuse part of that as being due to the taper combined with a smaller number of workouts, I still was definitely not making any progress.

As you may recall from the Blue Ridge Marathon, I posted a rather poor time due to the impact of the hills on that route. If some of the folklore type wisdom was correct (and it did seem to be consistent with where I was at the end of that training plan), then I should have been running at around a 4:05 time for a marathon. And if that is correct, if I can maintain an 8:54 pace for the Boogie Marathon that should put me under 4 hours and represent a 5 percent gain. I will certainly take that if I can make it. I am a bit worried about the impact of the heat and during the long runs on this training plan I felt like I struggled to maintain pace once the miles started racking up.

Look for my report on how things go!