After I finished Ironman Coeur d'Alene I was actually a little disappointed in what I had accomplished, mostly in the run really. And that left me with wanting a lot more from myself. So after some discussion with my coach we thought we could implement a good run block into the schedule and aim for an early season marathon. It worked out that my dad is turning 60 in March and decided he wanted to run a nice marathon for his birthday and he selected the
Napa Valley Marathon on March 5th 2017. So I decided that this race would be the perfect timing, this gave me about six months of training to get ready for a solid marathon and this would be great prep going into the Ironman training which is the main goal for 2017.
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| Visit Through China |
As this is my first blog post I am not going to outline what I have done for the past 6 months of training. The one thing I will say is that my coach has a theory for Ironman training that if you can complete 20 weeks straight of a 20 mile long run day then when it comes to the Ironman marathon, running the marathon would be no problem. So one day with a 16+ mile long run day I ended up running 20 miles and told my coach I was ready to attempt the 20x20. So we went for it and honestly I nailed it, it wasn't really as hard as I had expected. A few of those ended up on a treadmill due to traveling in China and snow storms. Being able to accomplish the 20x20 is more of a mental victory than physical.
So here I am one week out from my marathon and easily the best prepared I have ever been in my life. But if I didn't tell you I wasn't scared and nervous then I would be lying. Even though I have taken over 10min off my 1/2 marathon time this year and completed plenty of long hard days of training. I am still scared as hell about the pain and suffering that I will be experiencing 7 days from now... But this is why we do it right? To see where we can take our bodies and where our limits really are? Bring it on!
