A new beginning!

As alluded to in my SMH race report it seems that I need to do something to regain focus or I'll spend another winter vascillating about when and what to train for. Clearly I need a major goal to strive for and so have decided to begin immediately a program for the Sydney Marathon. Given this is only 16 weeks away (well actually 15 weeks and 6 days now) I've decided to adopt a program by Pete Pfitzinger and his book Advanced Marathoning.

This program is a paradigm shift for me and what I have been trying to do but also ties back into advice from my physio. For a while I have been trying to run faster and have been doing various interval/rep sessions with not a lot of improvement to really show as a result. That given I am going to forgo immediate speed to try and rebuild my endurance base further and at the same time work much harder on the core muscles which have been giving me grief on and off.

The program is based around the book's "medium distance" timetable for a 12 week prepararation and I am using the four initial weeks to build up to that starting point. It is interesting to note that for the first 4 weeks of the actual 12 week program there are no "intense" sessions but are focussed on endurance base building, then it shifts into Lactate Threshold training, followed by VO2 Max sessions and a taper, all ths time retaining endurance in the background.

I'm feeling pretty motivated to give this program my attention and have have spent a serious amount of introspective analaysis as well as shaping the program around my timetable till September. It will be interesting as it does seem to contravene some of the programs I have seen around the place from Pat Carroll and Sean Williams which have a lot more ongoing focus on speedwork. That said my endurance sessions will not be cruisy type runs and will be run at a tempo which suits my approximate marathon time goal of low 3 hours.

Just as another point of interest, with the fall off in post Canberra running I have added about 2.5kg and am back to 76 kg. I am thinking that with this program I may see the weight drop down close to 70kg which I would say is as low as I want to go. I have not set a "concrete" time for Sydney yet, lets see how things progress, there will be enough opportunities for assessing form/fitness towards the end. However I do want to run this marathon so that I can finish strongly and so the end goal must be achievable so I don't race off and go out too hard (again)!