The Hay is in the Barn

Unlike school, you can't cram for a marathon.  What's done is done.  The best thing I can do for myself is manage stress, get to bed early, hydrate and do a few recovery pace and short interval workouts to keep race pace dialed in.  Training is going to be challenging this week because Gennifer is out of town at a conference in New York City and I am on double daddy duty here in Miami.  Luckily, I don't have to train that much.

Today, I am going to do a scaled back version of the mixed intervals I did last week:  warmup: 1mi, 2K at half marathon pace (HMP), 1 mi at 10K pace, 1K at 5K pace, and 800m at 3K pace (7:56), cooldown 1 mile.  The paces are a function of previous race results, or in the case of 3K pace (which I've never raced), extrapolated from results at other distances.

As an aside, here is another cool website plug:  MacMillan Running Calculator.  It lets you determine what your time at one distance should be (if you train appropriately) based on a known time at another distance.  It will also give you goal training paces based on your desired finish time:

http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/index.php/calcUsage/calculate

Looking past the marathon, I have three triathlons coming up in the spring culminating in my next A race, Ironman 70.3 Florida on May 19, 2013.  The tuneup - B races are a sprint in early March - 2575 Triathlon Miami on March 10, and Nautica South Beach Olympic on April 7.  After the Half, I go into Ironman training with a vengeance with little more racing: maybe one more sprint over the summer (Trilogy I in June or Huntington's in July) and definintely the Escape to Miami Olympic tri in September.  Kind of an orderly progression - Sprint, Olympic, Half, Sprint Olympic, Full, with the Marathon, the Half and the Full being my A races.