Training may have just started but the road to running the New York City Marathon started long ago!  While the idea of traveling through all five boroughs of one of the greatest cities on earth on foot without stops might sound like torture to most people, it always seemed oddly appealing to me!  Getting into this event might be harder than actually running it though, so I’ve had my eyes set on this race for several years.  Luckily, I have finally earned my chance (Yes, I did earn it!) to participate, but I will tell that story another time.  For now, let’s hit the pavement and recap the first few weeks of training.

With race day set for November 1st, I am expecting this training cycle to be extra brutal.  I typically don’t start marathon training until late June when even the shorter “long runs” of only five or six miles suck.  Running in Florida in the summer heat is no joke!  At this point, I am usually in my post-race season lazy period when I lack all motivation to run.  I usually go a few weeks without running at all.  Not this year!  I officially started training May 1st, less than two weeks after my last race and exactly six months to race day.  By July, I’ll be well into double digit mileage runs that already feel miserable just thinking about them.  Ugh.

I need to stop worrying about July though and just focus on the now, which at three weeks in, I can say this training cycle is off to a good start!  With that said, it’s still hard.  I am not a morning person but that’s the only time I find bearable to run.  Luckily, I managed to drag myself out of bed and get an easy 2 mile run done before work on Day 1.

Two days later, I got an even earlier start.  I HAD to get this 5-miler done, but I also HAD to go to Magic Kingdom for the reopening of my favorite ride, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad!!  The run actually went much better than I thought it would.  I went outside at around 5:45am to discover the weather was unseasonably cool and breezy.  What a nice surprise!  It was perfect running weather and I felt great through all five miles!

Week two training brought some experimentation and more surprises, both good and bad.  It started on Wednesday when I walked outside and saw the most beautiful sunrise!  I will say we have a lot of gorgeous skies here in Orlando, but this was one of those that just took my breath away.  I couldn’t start my run fast enough!  Most of my runs start with a warm-up walk, but I couldn’t risk that sunrise going away before I could get some good unobstructed photos.  I ran the first couple blocks to find that perfect view and it was worth it!

The sunrise wasn’t the only highlight of what should have been a short and unremarkable midweek run.  It also marked the training debut of my new shoes!  I actually bought these Brooks Adrenaline GTS 25 shoes at a RunDisney expo in February, but had only worn them for everyday use a couple times up to this point.  They felt fantastic both walking around theme parks and on this run!  Much better than my first two pairs of RunDisney Brooks shoes.  Hopefully they will still feel good when I increase the mileage, but so far I am very happy with this purchase!  

In my eyes, these shoes were overshadowed by the Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend Castle shoes when they were released in January.  I saw people running in these that weekend and at Disneyland a few weeks later.  It was on the course when they really caught my eye.  You can’t really see much Disney in these shoes from this angle, but I think it’s pretty obvious why I named them my Blue Sky Shoes!  Yes, it is true.  I have names for all my running shoes!

Hill training is not something I’ve ever really done living here in flat-as-a-pancake Florida.  However, I want to be prepared for the bridges in New York and the hills of Central Park, so I knew I had to find a way to incorporate hills in my training plan.  I think what I learned on Day 4 of training was that you don’t really need a tall or super steep hill for this type of training.  My ass definitely felt it after running up the little hill by our neighborhood dog park eight times in a row!  Do you see that little hill in the photo below?!  I have some bigger hills in sight for future runs, but that’s all it took!

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but I hit the first bump in the road to New York the next day.  And it was a big one.  I slept terribly but still managed to get started just after 6am.  It was already warm and I felt sluggish for the first mile or so.  As usual, the run started feeling better after warming up and I kept a pretty good pace for the next three miles.  But then…nature called.

This is the part of the blog that runners will totally understand and other people will think is TMI.  My stomach just felt like it was going to explode!  I skipped a few running intervals in hopes that my stomach would settle if I just walked.  Well, it didn’t get any better and there was no way I could run at this point.  I was running a route that loops around the neighborhood perimeter, so I started cutting corners to find the fastest way home.  I thought I was closer to home than I was, but it turned out to be a mile and a half of walking as fast as I possibly could. It was 20 minutes of pure misery!

I only managed to cut two tenths of a mile off my planned route.  If I had realized how far away I was, I would have called my wife and asked her to pick me up.  But I finally got there.  

What a relief!  After that emergency pit stop, I went out and ran the last two tenths of a mile straight through.  I normally only run short 30 second intervals but I felt like I needed to run the rest for some sort of redemption.  That run sucked the life out of me, but at least I got the mileage in and finished.  It takes bad runs like this to appreciate the good runs.

That running disaster really wore me out and I think I paid for it the next couple days.  I wanted to get my first midweek run in before work on Monday, but I had zero motivation to get up early.  I didn’t run again until Thursday and luckily that was just an easy two miles.

The next day, I tried something new again – speed work!  I have never had a coach or followed a plan that called for different types of workouts.  I’m still not doing that, but I am trying to incorporate more training techniques that will help me conquer New York.  I just heard how to do 800 meter repeats using the Galloway method on my favorite running podcast LINK Rise and Run, so I thought I would give it a try.  I’m not entirely sure if I did it correctly but the results were impressive!  I didn’t just run faster on the repeats, the entire four mile run was faster than my average pace.  I’ll take it!

Week three ended with one more run and I decided to make it three days in a row.  I just wanted to get it over with and enjoy the rest of the weekend.  I love running in the neighborhoods surrounding my house, but I also love mixing things up and going other places too.  Of course, I am a creature of habit so when I have a seven mile run I almost always go to my old neighborhood!  I just have a route there that I absolutely love!  From the paved neighborhood trail, to running between the lakes and taking a little hidden path with a canopy of trees, this route just never gets old!  I enjoyed the scenery as always and had a really great run that made me feel so much better after week two’s total failure of a long run!!

After three mostly successful weeks of training, week four should be a breeze.  I have two easy midweek runs scheduled and then I get to take a break this weekend.  By break, I mean I will be walking around Disneyland for hours on end for four straight days!  This is what I call cross training!  That’s enough for today, but I’ll be back with more training updates after vacation.