Training for two marathons in a month

For frequent followers of this blog you undoubtedly know that I recently participated in the 2006 Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront marathon.

Here is the training program that I created and tried my best to follow. I started June 26, 2006 and am right now in the 15th week of training. Prior to the Toronto marathon, I had completed about 88% of the miles that I originally scheduled. Most of these workouts were done joggling. The times when I didn’t joggle were when I was doing speed work which was usually Thursdays.

So, now I’m in that phase between marathons. I didn’t have a great time in Toronto and I’m itching to do better in Chicago. But I’m afraid that if I don’t rest enough I’ll have an even worse time. When I did Chicago and New York back-to-back last year, I set a PR in Chicago and had a relatively slow run in New York. This year I want to do better in that second marathon.

How to do that? Well, you can see from the schedule that I will continue to run after the marathon. Last year I took an entire week off after Chicago and only logged 75 miles prior to New York. This year I’ve scheduled 130 miles in between. We’ll see if the extra miles and less rest keeps me in better shape for Chicago.

So far my legs feel good. Still a little sore but they feel good. I have to admit that I already broke my training because I felt compelled to do the Chicago Half Marathon this past weekend. It was great fun and I ran it with a friend at a pace that was relatively easy for me. We finished up in 2:05.

I did learn a new trick in that race however, backwards joggling. In backwards joggling you run backwards while juggling. Inspired by Michal’s tales of trying to set the world record for running a marathon backwards (the current record is 3:43:39) I wondered whether I could do it. So, in the last mile of the half marathon I spun around while joggling, faced the oncoming runners and kept joggling but backwards. My friend from high school and euchre partner was running with me and was kind enough to watch out for obstacles in my path. I didn’t do it for the whole last mile because I didn’t want to run into anyone but I did it enough to know that I could do a whole marathon that way. Hmmm.