Change of Plans

I've changed my plans on which marathon will be my first. I am now planning to run the Rock n Roll San Antonio Marathon on November 16, 2008! I have already registered and there are about 7 weeks left to start the official training for the marathon. Hopefully I will be running another 10k race (or maybe a 15k race) to have another benchmark to what will be my estimated marathon finish time, and make the necessary adjustments on pacings on the FIRST training plan. By the way I have been running regularly three days a week with two or three days of mountain biking. I'll update my stats this weekend hopefully.

Thursday Tempo

Today was tempo running session. Woke up at 5am to run in Calzada del Valle, nice 5km track for running through a nice neighborhood. I did 1.5km at an easy pace and then 6.5 at my mid-tempo pace (5:34 min/km pace) according to FIRST pacing chart and 5k reference time of 26:10. Finally closed the session running 1.5km easy pace. Result was 9.5km total and feelling very good. No tight joints or sore muscles (except for a slight ache in my middle toe of my left foot that I've had since several weeks ago). Hopefully its just that I am getting used to my new shoes. By the way, I went for a check-up with a sports doctor, and he told me I have my left leg slighlt longer than my right leg. This could be the reason of why I had a sore leg some months ago, and maybe also the ache in my toe.

Anyways, I'll be doing some easy biking tomorrow. Saturday I'm planning to do my long run of 12.5 kms and Sunday I'll be going mountain biking to a new track about 40 kms from Monterrey by the Saltillo highway to get prepared for the XC Mountain Bike race on May 18th.

Wednesday

Easy relaxed bike ride to relax legs. This time my wife also biked with me. I'm trying to get her hooked on biking haha. Very good ride for her third time biking.

Tuesday

Back to training the FIRST plan to try to improve my 10k time. 10 more weeks to finish the plan. Did track repeats today. I've noticed that the track repeats are quite intense, but anyway I'll try to do my best. Have not been blogging all of my trainings but my running distance has been updated.

Tuesday

1 hour and a half on Mountain Bike (70-80% of max heart rate) to prepare for this Sunday's race.

Monday

Total rest day from the 21k race.

21K - DONE!

Yesterday I ran my first 21k Race in Monterrey. About 3,000 runners. I had a target time of 2hr 17min (6:30 min/km pace) and managed to do way better finishing in 2hr 03 min! At the start of the race I repeated myself that I needed a slow pace to finish the race and not get too excited and run fast at the beginning and then feel the need to slow down. So I managed myself to run a good confortable pace and ran the first 10 kms at a 6:00 pace and the last 11 kms picked up a pace of 5:44! Drank lots of water througout the race, and two gels (one at the start and the other at half race)

I feel very satisfied with my first half-marathon. Feeling my legs a little tired, but nothing serious, except for a sore toe in my left foot (which I had since two weeks ago).

My plans for the next two weeks are to slow down in my running and run less distance. I will try to do more mountain biking so the sore can go away.

Next Sunday I'll be racing a 40km Mountain Bike Marathon.