5 Weeks to ING New York City Marathon: Last week's training

My last 150 mile week is finished, and now I can focus gearing up for a tune-up half-marathon in San Jose on the 6th. I will still keep my mileage close to 120 miles the week of the half to make sure I hit the race a little fatigued and do not peak a month out of NYC. My workout load was light this week due to my 16 mile tempo from the previous week. Dave Smith was worried I'd be pretty beat up, so we didn't schedule a workout until Thursday. The few days of easy running seemed to be enough, as I was able to run 19:06 and 18:58 for two 4 mile tempos with a 5 mile run at 6:00 pace in between. My ability to come back after a solid 16 mile tempo with 8 miles of work at half-marathon pace shows that we have the effort pretty well dialed in right now. I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do in San Jose, but the focus is obviously maintaining volume and strength for New York. I'm very pleased with my fitness right now, and I almost wish New York was closer. I'm ready to race.

Hopefully the trip to Oklahoma following San Jose will give me a break from the recent relentless rain in Portland. Even though the month of September was fairly dry up until last week, the rain from the last 5 days has been enough to push Portland over the record for rainfall in the month of September. It's been a brutal few days, but fortunately I didn't have any hard training sessions scheduled during that time...just lots of puddle pounding miles. Thanks again for reading, and I'll post again after the half-marathon in San Jose this weekend.

Week 9	AM	PM	Strength/Drills	Mileage
Monday	15	6	40 minutes core	21
Tuesday	12 + drills and grass strides	9		21
Wednesday	15	6.5	40 minutes core	21.5
Thursday	4.5	4 mile tempo, 30 min run, 4 mile tempo (19:06, 18:58) – 18.5 miles total		23
Friday	13	8	30 minutes core	21
Saturday	15	6		21
Sunday	5.5	16 miles + 6 x 200 meter hills		21.5
TOTAL				150