Another week of marathon training is in the books. Just five weeks to go until I run the Vernonia Marathon. Here’s what I did from Coach Dawn’s plan:Monday – Plan: 4 at recovery pace, add in a few strides towards the end.
Actual: Ran 4 early miles with a few strides.Tuesday- Plan: 1.5 miles easy
6 x 10 seconds fast at 7-8% w/ 3 recovery in between
5 minutes easy after last rep at 1%
1 mile easy at 2%
Easy until you reach 5-6 miles at -2% (negative)
Drills after
A skips, B skips, Butt kicks, Karaoke
Actual: It wasn’t too bad and I ended up with 6 miles. Ran the easy at ~6.4 mph and sprints at 8 mph when at 8% incline. Also, did did the drills afterwards.Wednesday – Plan: 2 miles easy w/ 4 strides
30 minute tempo- 7:45-55. You are fine if you are in the 7:55 range.
3 minutes easy
then 2 x 200m fast (around 45 seconds) with 1:30 easy in between
1.5 miles easy
Actual: I forgot about the strides. This was a hard one especially at the end with the 200s but I thought it went good overall. The 30 min tempo splits were 7:50, 7:47, 7:46 and 7:43. 200m splits were 6:10 and 6:18. Thursday – Plan: 1 hour easy to moderate pace.
Strength Training
Actual: This ended up being a rainy and windy run. I saw a hawk and was surprised it didn’t fly away after running by it so I had to take a selfie with it in the background 🙂 . But the rain and wind picked up towards the end of the run and was glad to get it over with. I did the strength training afterwards which were you tube videos.Friday – Plan: 1 mile easy
3 miles 8:25-30
+ 5-10 min core
Actual: This went fine. 3 mile splits were 8:23, 8:23, 8:22. I also did about 5 min of core work afterwards.Saturday – Plan: Vernonia course
You can do 15-17 miles here.
Do the first climb, and then around a mile of the downhill if the mileage works out from where you start.. if you need more on the way back just go out and back to equal 15 miles.. up to around 16.
Finish with the last 20-25 minutes at around 8:20-25.
The rest you can do easy to moderate, or do easy and thrown in some fast surges throughout. 
Actual: I ended up running this with friends. So much more fun! We started at a different trail head from what I did last year and it had quite the elevation gain after looking at it on Strava, 925 ft elevation. It went good except my watch went wacky the last half. For some reason my lap paces were off. The last 3 miles were off since I picked up the pace. My Garmin had me at 8:44, 8:40, 8:42. They were most likely around 7:56, 8:01, 8:07(Mariah’s splits from Strava) since we were going downhill. Also, it was my first time running with a dog. Hudson did awesome! It would be cool to have a dog to run with. Perhaps in the future, but not so near future haha.

Sunday –  Plan: Rest day.
Actual: Rest day.

Total miles = 44.09 miles. I’d say it was another good week. So thankful things are going well! I’ll be running the Portland Shamrock Half Marathon next Sunday, so I’m excited for that.

As for highlights of the rest of the week:

Nothing too exciting. Errands and house stuff. I work Sundays so it wasn’t fun waking up an hour earlier.

That pretty much wraps up my week. How’d your week go? Any races coming up?

I’m linking up with HoHo Runs and Wendy of Taking the Long Way Home  for the Weekly Wrap.