Running with Jack

Running Report

I’m kind of stiff this morning, I guess I pushed harder than I thought during my half-marathon on Saturday. I was also standing around quite a bit yesterday at the Christmas market, this was probably not the best thing for my recovery.

Speaking of recovery, basically there isn’t going to be a “recovery period”, yesterday was it, tonight it’s back to the training schedule with a 14K/8.7M run at recovery pace. Tuesday night is swim night, Wednesday another 14K run, Friday night swimming and Saturday morning a 26K/16M run.

Swimming Report

This past Friday was my swim course (#9), our instructor decided to have us play a game. She set it up to where we would roll a dice and do laps as follows:

Roll a 1: 25 meter breast stroke
Roll a 2: 50 meter breast stroke
Roll a 3: 25 meter freestyle
Roll a 4: 50 meter freestyle
Roll a 5: 25 meter back stroke
Roll a 6: Free choice

This was kind of fun, of course the day before my half-marathon you can be sure that I was rolling 2’s and 4’s the whole night. I guess I swam about 700-800 meters all together, but I really didn’t keep track. I decided to go home after class, rather than do extra laps like I usually do. I didn’t want to wear myself out too much before my race.

I tried to sign up for the freestyle class that starts in January, the class is already full. Registration started on December 1st and the class was filled up in the first half-hour. So they added my name to the waiting list for the next class in March or April. I am really disappointed, it kind of upsets my long range plans a little.

Diet Report

Dieting was not an issue this weekend with the annual Christmas market across the street. I had expected to gain back a pound or two, but it turned out to be a major disaster, I gained 4 (four) pounds this weekend, putting me back up to 165 lbs. Of course when I think about all the junk I put in my mouth this weekend it is definitely not a surprise. Needless to say my diet is in full gear today, I want to be back down to 161 lbs. by the end of the week. I think I can do it.

Marathon Training Thoughts

Mia was wondering if I am going to decrease my cross-training and increase my running since I have officially committed myself to the Bienwald (Bee Forest) marathon in March. Originally I had planned on running only 3 days a week and cross-training 3 days a week. This was partly because of the freestyle swim course that I had planned on taking Thursday nights starting in January and partly due to the cold weather.

It appears that my swim course won’t happen until after the marathon, so I may change one cross-training day to a fourth running day. The other cross-training days will be swimming, cycling, weight training or some combination, but with at least one swim day per week.

In order to include a little variety in my training menu I plan on running a cross-country race at the end of January. After the marathon there are several cross-country and mountain runs that I would like to run, as well as at least a couple half-marathons. So I will stay active in 2006.

Tri plans have been set on the back burner until I complete my freestyle course. At this point it looks like this may be a 2007 goal, but we’ll see.