New Plan on Tuesday
My computer ate my marathon training schedule. Is that the best excuse ever for slacking, or is it up there with ‘the dog ate my homework’?
My guess is the latter, especially as there is obviously more than one training schedule in the entire universe. It’s just that I liked that one – it could be downloaded and imported into my Outlook calendar and if I didn’t fancy training that day, I could satisfyingly click the delete button and – whoosh! – it had gone like it never said ‘go and run, you lazy moo, you’ve got a marathon to train for’ in the first place.
However, neither a) pressing the delete button; nor b) having my computer eat my training schedule means that I don’t actually have a marathon to run at the end of November, so I thought I’d better get myself a new training schedule. This new-found motivation was partly helped by getting inspired after nipping down the road to Wye on Sunday to see Louise shortly after she’d finished running the Centurion 100. For those of you who don’t know what that is, the Centurion 100 is a running race of 100 miles. I know… hardcore. Louise is especially hardcore as it’s the third 100 mile race in a series of four she’s done this year and if you do all four you get a special t-shirt and a piggyback from Mo Farah. (I might have made up the Mo Farah bit.)
Louise enjoying a veggie sausage sandwich after running 100 miles
So, off to the Hal Higdon website I went to get me a new marathon training plan. Here it is.
Hal Higdon novice marathon training plan
Because I had to buy a new computer and my new computer doesn’t have Outlook or any decent email program on it, I couldn’t get an electronic schedule and had to go old school and print one off on to paper. Then, because it’s an eighteen-week schedule and my marathon’s in sixteen weeks, I had to use one of those old-fashioned pen things and cross out the first two weeks.
But, as you can see, I successfully completed day one by resting and I even successfully completed day two by going out for a three mile run this morning. And, yay me – I did it without stopping to walk like a lame-o and even managed sub-11:30 minute miles. This might be because I left the house at 8:20am and needed to be back by 9am for a delivery but you’ve got to get your incentive to work harder from somewhere, haven’t you?
As an added bonus, I even inadvertently GPSd myself a moose’s head.
A moose, do you think?
I usually manage to slack off Wednesday’s running by going on a walk, but I haven’t got any walks planned for tomorrow, so I might just do the 4 miles Hal wants me to do.
Or I might go and buy some Tippex.