Have I Mentioned...

Have I mentioned that, caught up in the excitement of watching/cheering at the NYC Marathon, and wanting to do a full 26.2 as a stand-alone race before tacking it on to a 2.4 mile swim and 112 mile bike-ride, I decided to sign up for a marathon!

Which one?  The Miami Marathon.  The criteria were:

1. far enough away time-wise that I have time to train
2. not to far time-wise that it will overly affect IM training
3. flat course
4. relatively easy to get to.

Miami fit the bill nicely.  It seems to be my race home away from home. (2 tris there so far, and another coming up in April).  Doesn't hurt that the folks have a place there, so I don't have to pay for hotels.   Some major bonuses are that they have live music all along the course, and that the start time is early enough that unless something goes dismally wrong, I'll be done by 11AM, and can hop a plane back home in time to meet my girls and get them ready for school on Monday.

As for running programs, I got this one from Runner's World.  It turns out that Nate used the same one training for NYC.  I like that it gives you two key workouts per week-one which works on speed and the other on distance, and you plug in the rest of the miles (easy runs with strides thrown in, or just easy).  You also pick maximum mileage per week(=100%).  Following Nate's example, I'm going with 45 miles as my max.  Considering that up until recently I hadn't run even 25 a week, 45 miles as a maximum seems like a reasonable, injury preventative number.

This week, though, now done, was a 34+ miler, which was easy to do, considering the beautiful scenery: