The long and the short of it

I'm at that stage, about 19 weeks out from the Gold Coast marathon that I need to start thinking about structuring my runs a little more.

I had a chat about the marathon training to a friend on Saturday night who asked me what speed work I was doing. I looked at him rather sheepishly and said none. Running's hard, running fast is even harder! He urged me to do some. I know full well when I come back from two months overseas that the running club I'll be joining will have one session of speed work a week. Probably makes sense to start now rather than in 8 weeks time. Same goes for the long slow runs.

So I sucked it up.

Run: 1:26 | 13km | 6m 37s/km. Have been a little worried that I may have over-done the Vibram running in the last week. My feet have been tender. So I did this run in my Asics, which I just don't love anymore. I feel so sluggish. Oh wait, I was. Mentally I wasn't really up for this and physically I was tired and dehydrated. It didn't help that the water fountain I found wasn't working. The whole way back saw me constructing a letter to the Council about the matter!

Sun; run: 21:30 | 3.76km | 5m43s/km. I put my long slow run off for a day and took the Vibrams out for a speed session on the local cricket oval. What a dream it was to run on. The session involved 1min efforts with 45s-1min standing rest.