First Day of Pfitz Plan!

Well, second day, really. The first day of training was a rest or cross training day, and it was quite comical to lounge around the house having a beer Sunday night saying look, dear, I'm training for a marathon!

So I hit my bodybuilder gym (which I am REALLY starting to love as a runner....nobody to duke it out with to find a treadmill) for that first run, which was scheduled as 7 miles with 10 x 100m strides. Strides are basically accelerations to the point where you're running as all-out as you can, but are still able to do ten repeats of them within the run. (I had no idea either...last week, I figured that since I was starting the plan soon, I'd better get a good understanding of what they entailed). I wasn't sure how exactly to go about them and just decided I'd run for half an hour at a moderately hard pace and then get going on 'em.

With that first workout completed, here are my thoughts, observations and comments:

1. NO PAIN! Woohoo! I was SO excited about that. Knock on wood but I think the quality workouts on this plan followed by rest days are going to be good for that ITB.

2. Strides are fun.

3. People at the gym turn and stare when they hear a treadmill running fast during those strides, to see if you're going to go flying off the back. Luckily that didn't happen tonight.

4. I now know that our gym's treadmills top out at 8.0, or a 7:30 pace. This was not quite as fast as I wanted to go but given that I'm racing this weekend and am trying to staying healthy, it'll do for now.

So I've got another rest day today. I was running 5 days in a row, Saturday through Wednesday, so at least for now I'm feeling very spoiled about this plan! Whatever gets me to the start of the Marine Corps Marathon healthy, though, is okay by me.

I'm taking a mile off of tomorrow's scheduled 9 miles, since I'm tapering for the Slacker on Saturday during this first week of marathon training, and therefore running 13.1 on a day when my marathon plan dictates 12. Hopefully the running gods will be cool with that, and will allow me to race well. :)