Too Many Priorities

Happy Friday Wednesday! Working in the fabulous education industry has warranted me a nice mid-week holiday tomorrow, and a nice long weekend to look forward to!

Tonight is track night, and my leg is feeling good, so I am hoping I can do something good tonight rather than just flail about like I did last week at the track.


Yesterday I cross-trained...a lot. I could have run, but I have some big runs planned the rest of the week, and a pissed off knee would not have fit into that schedule so I did some spinning, so hand bike action (SO boring btw) and some more spinning, exciting I know. I am a bit nervous to still only be in the 4-5 day a week range with the running and not the 5-6 range, I feel like a February marathon is starting to seem like a long shot right now.


So obviously I have a lot of races scheduled in the coming months, and I would be lying if I said I didn't have specific goals for each of them.
-I am hoping for a half-marathon PR in just 10 short days, and only 7 weeks after setting my last one.
-I also trying to drop 90 seconds off of my 5k PR for seeding purposes for a spring race.
-Lastly, I have a redemption marathon in just 13 weeks that I need to start building back up for, like now!

Even as I type this, I realize how ridiculous this all sounds. I am trying to focus on 3 major goals that are each a daunting task all on their own, and yet I am somehow trying to roll all 3 strategies into 1 condensed training cycle, I might have tried to take on too much. I would rather have 1 or 2 really awesome races with new PR's that 5 or 6 mediocre ones, and I am worried that there is not enough time to really be able to focus on the specific training to achieve each of the goals I have, but I can't bring myself to back off of any of those.


This past fall when I started racing again after a summer of base building and marathon training, I was smashing old PR's left and right, by minutes at a time, and to be honest it was easy. Most of my PR's were from last fall or early spring when I was still considerably slower, my speed had improved enough that a PR was a given, it was just a matter of how much. Unfortunately, I am not in that position anymore. My months of focusing on distance and now recovery I feel like has left me stagnant for the first time since I started running. I think over the last year all I have focused on is increasing my distance, and that is all, the speed just came on it's own. Now that I have reached the maximum distance that at this point I am willing to train for, I am only focused on speed, and I just don't know if I can build the improvements in my speed as quickly as I have been able to improve my ability to run the distance.

I suppose we can call this a post-marathon rut, or possibly being a litte over-whelmed as to how to proceed with all of my goals, or maybe it is injury-paranoia who knows, but I don't seem to have the same focus I did when I was in the thick of marathon training, and to be honest a think a lot of it is because I don't really know what to focus on. Focusing on nothing is certainly not the way to go, but I don't really know where to start. Hopefully starting with today's track workout will provide some guidance.