I don’t see nothing new but I feel a lot of change

The Scotiabank Waterfront Toronto marathon is four weeks from today. 

Despite starting the week off on the stationary bike I had a productive week of running.  I put in some decent mileage and had two solid workouts.  The first workout felt a little tough because I was still recovering from the 1/2 marathon but I felt great for Saturday’s workout.  In both workouts Gillis and I managed to get in a lot of running at or around marathon pace.  Rob “Destroyer” Watson joined us for our mid-week workout, which was nice to have another body in the mix. Wednesday was an easier session as we were doing 5 minute intervals and on Saturday we had a total of 62 minutes of 3:04-3:08 pace with only 6 minutes of rest in the mix.  Thankfully we started early enough to avoid the heat on Saturday and then we followed up the workout with crepes from Olympic Crepes at the Guelph Farmer’s Market.

My shin (anterior tibial tendon) cleared up pretty quickly and I probably could have run on Monday but I decided to play it safe and wait one more day.  Unfortunately last Sunday and Monday we had wet weather, otherwise I would have gone biking outside.  The first day back I wanted to avoid hills and stay on grass so I did all my running around Churchill park.  I felt pretty fresh after the two non-impact days except my quads were tired throughout the week from a few hours of biking (which happens to be a few hours more than any other week).

The dude (Julius Kogo) who beat me in Parkersburg last weekend came back this Saturday to win the Crim 10 miler in Flint, MI.  It always makes me feel a little better when I get beat by someone who is fast.  Kogo also finished 10th this year at the Kenyan Cross-Country championships and 3rd at the Healthy Kidney 10k in NYC this past May.

In a few days we have our last long effort before the marathon (no other single session will be longer than 32km).  This session will have the most volume around marathon pace however once you add in the warm-up and cool-down it probably won’t be our largest total volume in a workout.  It looks like it will be quite hot this week and we’re going to do this workout early in the morning.  After that session there is still plenty of work to be done in the coming weeks including another set of fast miles. 

I can’t believe David Rudisha has already bettered his 1:41:09 800M World Record. 

Here is the Berlin footage.  FAST!

Here is the Rieti footage.  FASTER!