Intro - 12 days in

A brief bio of me first. I am a senior physics student at the University of Wisconsin River Falls. I will be graduating in May, and am training to run my third marathon on October 7th. I have yet to decide which marathon to run, as the Twin Cities Marathon in Minneapolis/St. Paul and the Milwaukee Lakefront marathon are on the same days. I am from Milwaukee, but my school is located just 20 min from the twin cities. But registration is not for a month or so, so I have time to decide.

My first marathon I ran in 4:15 which was well beyond my expectations since I did almost no training. I ran a half marathon about 3 months before the marathon, and jogged sporadically for the summer, and did absolutely no running the month leading up to the marathon (and no this was not an attempt at a super taper, just laziness)

For my second marathon I decided about 15 weeks before the marathon to start training regularly and with a program. I found a good one at halhigdon.com and since I am a young cocky male, I decided to follow his Advanced II program. This involved lots of speed work, and a gradual buildup to 6 weeks that involved 20 mile runs. I was able to follow this program very well, despite being hit with shin splints in the middle, which sidelined me for about 2 weeks. This time the month leading up to the marathon I did some running, but I choose to do other things once school started, and running got put on the back burner. My goal was 3:15 and I was confident I could do it.

During the marathon I was feeling great at my pace, I was even slightly ahead of where I should have been at about 7 miles. Then I started to notice a slight pain in my knee. This grew and grew until at 10 miles I was off my pace, and other parts of my legs were in pain from compensating. I struggled on, and ran into my family at 15 miles, who conveniently had some Aspirin on them. That helped a little, but what made my day great was the knee brace the found at a local Walgreens, and gave to me at 20 miles. With the drugs and brace I felt much better, but still sore from all the compensation. I finally finished at 4:11, disappointed but pleased that I was able to finish.

This year I have the same goal, but I am going to double the time I will allot to training, and I will make sure I correct my running form and strengthen vital parts of my body to reduce the risk of injury.

This winter I kept up my running, and participated in the American Birkiebeiner cross country ski marathon. This year it was shortened due to a lack of snow, but it kept me in shape all the way up to the end of February. So going into March I had been training, doing some hill sprints, long runs, and fartleks. Some weeks my weekly mileage got up to 5o miles. I then slowed down at the start of March to prepare myself for my marathon training.

I will be training for 30 months leading up to the marathon. The first 12 weeks will be a speed training program once again from Mr. Hal Higdon. It is called his "Spring Training: Advanced" program. It incorporates hill training, fartlek, tempo, interval, "sorta-long" runs, recovery runs, and races. Then afterwards I will use his 18 month marathon training program Advanced II version which incorporates a lot of the same as the speed training, but with more of a focus on building mileage and working on marathon pace. Also, no racing :(

The spring training program is here: http://www.halhigdon.com/spring/Springadvance.htm
and the marathon program is here: http://www.halhigdon.com/marathon/advancedint.htm

The 30 week mark from the marathon was March 11th, But since the program starts on a Monday I started on the 12th.

The first week went well. I got all my workouts in and felt very good.

The second week was/is a bit tougher. I felt awesome on my 6x hill runs, but the next day during a 4mi recovery run, I started to notice a slight twinge in my shins. My though was "oh no not again" so I immediately started a program of ice, elevation, stretching, and some slight strength training exercises. The next day was a 40 min fartlek, and my shin splints started to come back again, so I took a couple walking breaks to try and prevent any more of an injury. I was able to run most of it, and again felt great. Today I had a 3mi recovery run that I spent only about 1mi running. I figured that its recovery for a reason, and took no chances today.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a 30min Tempo run, and I will see how I feel going into it. Hopefully I caught this before it became a major problem. (I tried to run through the pain early on last summer and it bit me back hard).

The next couple posts should not be as long since I am done giving the basic back story :) Thanks!