Well, that’s Week 1 of my 12-week marathon training program in the bag!

It was, on the whole, a successful week’s training. I completed all of the runs I was supposed to and achieved my projected running mileage for the week (projected 42 miles, actual mileage 42.76 miles). One of my speed sessions wasn’t quite as complete as I’d have liked – on my 6 miles with strides on Thursday I only did two 30-second stride blocks instead of the planned five or six as I felt tired and like I just didn’t have that many sets of strides in me! However, at least I got two in! I did quite a bit of swapping around of sessions to different days than planned this week due to the vagaries of this cold winter weather that we’re having in Colorado currently, and so I ended up doing another speed session on Friday (normally I’d space them out more). The Friday one was a great success, though, and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would (I sometimes find doing speedwork on my own quite tough, having been used to doing it with a big group previously at my running club in Glasgow). Friday’s session included 10 x 30-second fast hill repeats with jog recoveries downhill in between and it actually felt great to do some proper structured speedwork again!

I did my long run of 12.2 miles on Saturday rather than on Sunday, after seeing a weather forecast early on Saturday morning which warned of how seriously cold it was to be on Sunday. This turned out to be a good move, as sure enough it has been extremely cold today (single digit Fahrenheit temperatures).

Strength training-wise, I got my two planned 30-minute strength sessions done, plus a few core exercises after some of my runs during the week.

I have to confess that cross-training didn’t happen this week (life got in the way), but I very much want to get back to some indoor cycling this coming week.

I’m looking forward to getting into Week 2 of training! Only 11 weeks on Monday (January 30th) until Boston!

Wishing everyone a successful week ahead!

Thanks for reading!

Lynne.