Mid-Year Update

Silly McHair has inspired me to do some math:

It's June 30th. Half way. After this evening, I'll be at roughly 1,000 miles for the year.... or roughly 38 miles per week average.

A year ago, I was at around 1,225... or roughly 47 miles per week average. I rounded out last year with a total of 2280 in 10 months, then 2 months of absolute downtime due to the SFX.

Sadly, I'm embarrassed to say I've only run 1,000 miles this year. I'm 18% under where I was a year ago, and a lot of this year's mileage has been concentrated in only a very short period of time.


YTD:

- I was basically handicapped for the first month of training this year, which delayed any decent mileage until March...

- Then I crammed for London... which included many shin splits.

- Then took a couple weeks of down time or lower volume to recover...

- Then paced 20 miles of the Green Bay Marathon with Claudia and Jason, which GB+London took a far greater toll on me than I anticipated...

- So I then took even more down time for a few more weeks...

- Then when I was finally ready to start bumping my miles on June 1st, I basically broke ANOTHER toe at a street fest by massively stubbing it, and was forced to delay any sort of roll up in mileage....

- Which brings me to now: I finally hit 40 miles last week. Not quite where I'd like to be, but not horrible. I only feel mildly disgusting... but at least I'm healthy.


Going forward: I'm only signed up for 2 races at this moment... the Chicago Half Marathon in September and the New York City Marathon in November.

Any racing leading up to NYC will be a function of training for a PR in NYC - which won't be easy, since its a very difficult course.

Training basically began for NYC last week - with my whopping 40 miles (gotta start some where). I had 1 workout last week: a 4 mile tempo run. I'll have 1 workout this week: mile repeats tonight. Next week, I start kicking it into gear.

My basic stratergy: I'll make a steady climb up towards ~75 miles/week, hang on to that for 3 or 4 weeks, then push to 100 for a month, then come back down.

The key will be remaining injury free and trying to stay as "fresh" as possible.