Philadelphia Marathon - Training...Part 1

Coming off of Cleveland, I had just set a 7 minute PR of 2:37:46 and a 5th place finish. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined running that kind of time. 5 years ago, I was 185 pounds and had a 5K PR of 21:09. I had read Brad Hudson's book on self-coaching back in the spring and used some of the elements of his philosophy over the last month of my Cleveland plan, which was still largely based on two training programs set up for my by Matt Woods of Malone. One of Brad Hudson's philosophies is that training must be adaptive. In other words, you can't use the same old tricks and expect to continue to improve. Because I wouldn't have time to implement a 5K or 10K training cycle, my challenge was to figure out how to modify my older plans to yield improvement rather than burnout from over training. Another problem I had was time and energy. I simply could no longer get up at 4:00 am and knock out workouts. I was mentally exhausted from working calculus/physics problems during the day (and in my dreams at night...no lie) and rest was at a premium. In addition, I was unable to run with the Wednesday a.m. group. Those guys (Jim, Damon, Rich, Nilesh) have had more to do with my improvements than I can express. There is definitely a learning curve to marathoning, and my curve was paved with ice before I met those guys. Regardless, everyone has obstacles so I lived by the saying, "build a bridge and get over it." Training began.