March 27 - April 2 Training

Monday: 3 miles (9:22), 5 miles (9:22).  Weather was bad today with storms, so ran both runs on the treadmill.
Tuesday: 2 miles (9:15), 4 miles (7:59), 2 miles (9:41). 2 mile warmup and then a tempo run on the Station Camp Loop Jr.  PR by 1:18 from last week's PR. Although the 3rd mile was about 10 seconds slower than last week, but I ran 7:40 pace from Lower Station Camp to Big Station Camp and that tired me for the Big Station Camp hill. I was supposed to add 2 x 400m on/off, and ran one on the 2 miles after the loop, but I felt out of gas from the tempo loop and only ran 1 at 1:35.
Wednesday: 5 miles (9:14), 3 miles (9:08).  Two easy runs.  81 degrees outside this afternoon, it is warming up.
Thursday: 4 miles (9:22).  Easy treadmill miles.
Friday: 4 miles (9:28).  Kept it real easy with a marathon scheduled for tomorrow.
Saturday: 26.47 miles (9:03).  Andrew Jackson Marathon in Jackson, TN.  Finished at 3:59:33, which happens to be exactly the time of my first marathon in 2013 to the second.  Today, I finally tried my run/walk experiment.  I ran 5 minutes and then walked 1 minute and did that all the way until the last mile, where I skipped the last walk break so I could get under 4 hours.  It really worked brilliant.  For a while, I would see the same people catch up to me while I was on my walk break, and then I would go ahead of them on my run interval.  But eventually, they never caught up to me on my walk break and I would never see them again.  If you look at my training logs and race results the last 4 month, with very few long runs, it would not look like I could run a sub 4 marathon on a hilly course. Only because of the run/walk was I able to.  Had I ran this without walk breaks, I would have probably died at the half way point.  Now I just have to come up with the right strategy for London in 3 weeks.
Sunday: 4 miles (9:52), 3 miles (9:47).  Slow post-marathon shuffle miles on Sunday afternoon starting at the library and going to Drakes Creek Park.  Added a second recovery run in the early evening in the neighborhood.

Total Miles: 65.5.  My highest weekly total since the 3rd week of February.  Going into this week, I really doubted whether I could run a sub 4:00 marathon.  So it was nice to get some confidence at the Andrew Jackson Marathon. With a couple more decent weeks of training before heading to London, hopefully I can improve my conditioning and maybe shoot for sub 3:48.    If I can get under 3:48, that would make it my 3rd fastest marathon. That would be a good goal to take into that race.