The Hamptons Marathon Training: Week = -1

Training for The Hamptons Marathon full begins in just one short week! Yikes!

Unfortunately for Dr. Trot, someone has been doing a lot more hydrating and fueling like this…

and like this…

than in a happy-marathon-day minded way. Oops!

So, that must all change starting now!

I have spent the last two weeks getting over my bad-behavior-induced cold/cough (getting old is rough man…) and only felt like I could put in some productive miles starting this weekend. So that’s what we did.

Saturday 5/10: ~5 mi @ who knows
It was nice and warm out with a light breeze. And humid 🙂 — which was great for the lungs but kept the pace pretty slow (Yes, yes of course I’m blaming the humidity for that — my fitness level certainly had nothing to do with it!) It felt great to get out and get moving which was a nice sign considering how I have been feeling lately

Sunday 5/11: ~7.5 mi @ slow + a few “I’m hot” pauses

It was nice and warm (~80F) again today with less humidity (30%) and no real wind to speak of. Today’s run was a really pretty route that I don’t usually take. I need to get over the one mile difference between 6 and 7 miles because this is a really pretty route. About 1/3 is on a great dirt trail along the canal, another 1/3 is along a paved country road that winds its way through fields and undeveloped land just outside of Pton, and then 1/3 is on two of the little roads going in and out of town. While I will maintain that the lack of public water out here (particularly along the tow path — the gravel path along the canal that people used to walk on way back in the day as they towed boats down the canal) is total bull shit, this is a really great route. AND, now that I’m well aware of this egregious deficiency of the Northeast, and have a wonderful, multipurpose, purple side back-kick…

there shouldn’t be any too many near-death-by-dehydration issues to complain about (that doesn’t mean that there won’t be — there just shouldn’t be). Anyway, it was just nice to survive today a great way to start off the training season 🙂

Now, in an attempt to survive make the most of this training season, Dr. Trot is uncharacteristically prepared 7 days out from Week #1. The game plan is as follows:

1. Follow a training schedule with 4 running days/week (very similar to last year).

For anyone interested in this kind of a marathon training schedule, here it is in an even-easy-enough-for-Dr-Trot-to-use Google calendar format –

The mileage maxes out at 46 mi/week 4 weeks before the marathon and every third week is a cutback. The long runs are scheduled for Saturdays (a to get it out of the way 1st thing on the weekend and b) to prep for a Saturday marathon. The second weekend run is meant to simply get more miles in on tired legs. Fun. The two weekday runs are on Tuesday and Thursday so Monday can be a rest day after the truckload of weekend miles and Friday can be a rest day in preparation for said miles. I’m going to try to keep my Tuesdays a bit shorter and faster (think tempo runs or fartleks) while the Thursday runs will be longer but easier miles. I personally have a hard time breaking away from work 3 times a week to run and some extra time off my feet between Tuesday and Thursday is nice to have (think “operation avoid the damn shin splints”). However, if you prefer to be out 5 days instead of 4, by all means, take Tuesday a little easier, get a short fast run in on Wednesday, and then maybe take a mile or two or three off of the Thursday run to avoid burning out.

I feel like I should also mention something about the signs of overtraining and how to amend the schedule if these start to appear. In short, shave a mile or two off of the shorter runs, or scrap one day a week altogether, to give the body a chance to recharge while doing your best to keep the long run…the most important…more or less on schedule. Since that really doesn’t do justice to the “Oh shit I’m overtraining! What do I do?” realization, I’ll have to be back with more on that later. Hopefully it’ll be a few months before this is necessary. Hopefully…

2. Include a daily core exercise program to shed this life jacket that I’ve been wearing since Feb…2004… (very dissimilar to last year)

The aim will be to follow the off season strength training regime (more diligently) –

1. Kneeling hip-flexor stretch
2. Superman
3. Metronome
4. Crunches
5. Plank (+lift)
6. Side plank (+lift)
7. Supine plank
8. Pushups

The lofty goal will be to go through these 8 pains in my core little treasures (x2) after Tuesday’s run, the Saturday long run and the Sunday recovery run (3x per week). I also want to make my favorite plank, pushups and a quick abs search-and-rescue mission regular occurances on the other 4 days of the week (rest days included). Good luck to me.

3. Keep tabs of what works, what sucks and what translates into better fitness — vs. just a crabbier, tireder (of course that’s a word) Dr. Trot — by honest-to-god-pinky-swear-really-really-really-I’m-serious-this-time keeping a running journal.

I’ll probably definitely subject you to excerpts of this as a means of forcing myself to do it and keeping it PG-13.

4. Work is important but not 24/7/365 important.

I want to should do all of the above and if that means I can’t put in all of the +18 hr work days that someone would like me to, that’s ok. Life will continue, probably even as we know it, and the bugs will wait until tomorrow for me. (And if they don’t, it’ll be a hell of a lot more interesting paper than anything I’m going to get out of these +18 hr experiment days!)

4. Beer is not dinner and does not count as carb-loading.

Alrighty, and with that, I think I need to go. I apparently need to search for some long lost core muscles and write in a stupid journal. Some people and their crazy ideas

Have a great upcoming THMT Week = 0!