For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to get back into training mode with little success. I'm finding that I'm struggling to maintain paces I was able to keep towards the end of my marathon training. I've tried some speed work with some success, although my paces are a little slower than I wanted. My tempo runs however, they just plain suck. My last training run before the marathon was 7 miles at just under an 8 min pace. I've tried a couple times to do 4 or 5 mile tempos and I'm hovering close to 10 seconds above an 8 and really struggling to keep that. Granted, it is summer... but I'm finding it hard to put the blame on just the weather.
After several weeks of frustrating runs my coach recommended I hit the reset button. To do this, I ignored my garmin, adding my ipod back into the mix and just ran to enjoy it. Yesterday it was close to 90 degrees with 70% humidity and I did an 8.5 mile run at a moderate pace, and I loved it. The music was a great distraction that I haven't incorporated into my running for 6 months or more. With the weather being so hot I expected to hate this run, but I actually really liked it. It wasn't easy by any means, but because I enjoyed it we are counting this as a successful run.
This week I'm going to do 3 more runs just like this, ignore the garmin, add the music and just run to enjoy. Hopefully this will get me over my hurdle of bad runs so that I can be ready to start training for marathon #2 in a couple weeks. I'm hoping that recovery after my second marathon will go better than the first one, as in faster. I don't know if I can handle another recovery schedule like this.
I wonder if I'm the only one struggling like this? Is it just because it's my first one and I didn't know what to expect? Or maybe I'm just not cut out for the marathon?
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