Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Marathon Training and Eating

As I posted yesterday we are training for a marathon in June.  We are following a training schedule from the Marathon book that we are reading.  My wife has already read the book and I am about half way through currently.  The schedule includes several running days each week and some days for other cross training.  On the cross training days we have been doing some Beach Body workouts, mostly 21 Day fix so far, and some other made up upper body and ab workouts.  Mostly we try not to work out legs on those days to give them time to recover.

Something else that I think is helping my training a lot is the way we have been eating.  I recently read a couple of books about diet.  One was called Deep Nutrition https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Nutrition-Your-Genes-Traditional/dp/1250113849.  The other one is called Eat Fat To Get Thin https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Fat-Get-Thin-Sustained/dp/0316338834.  I may write some more about those books at some point, but one of the main ideas from both of them is to cut out almost all sugar and simple carbohydrates from your diet.

We have been eating this way for several weeks now.  I think it helps very much with my soreness and recovery time from these runs and workouts.  Eating more healthy fat also keeps me from getting hungry on long runs.  The longest I've done so far has been 7 miles, so we will see if that continues to be true, but it seems better than before already.  I will go more into what I have been eating in some future posts.

Sunday, February 23, 2020

Marathon Training

My wife and I are planning to run a marathon in Havre, MT on June, 6th 2020.  It will be my first marathon and my wife's second marathon.  She ran the Missoula marathon several years ago.

We started training about 2-3 weeks ago.  I have done several runs, today being the longest at 7 miles.  My knees hurt a bit, but I think it was because of all the sugar I ate the day before.  It was my son's birthday party.

I believe this 7 mile run was my longest run ever, so far.  I averaged about 11 min/mile.  I think on a day when my knees are feeling better I could get closer to a 10 min/mile average.  With more training I could even do better at that distance.  At full marathon distance I will probably keep the speed slow to avoid injury.  We are following a training plan from this book (Marathon You Can Do It! by Jeff Galloway) https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B004I6D6WG&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_LyVuEb2THE86S.

I'm going to try to document the process here on my blog as much as I can.

We are also going to be running a Spartan race in Bigfork, MT in May of 2020.  We are doing some additional training for the obstacles.  This will be my third Spartan race.  The first 2 my wife and I did last year in Arizona, and Bigfork.  They were both Sprints, which are about 3 miles.  The race this year will be about 7-8 miles I think.  I'm going to try to post more about the training for that also.