Mid week, Oct. Race Times Update, 5 and 10K training, Improving Marathon times

The midweek workouts are posted as well as the October Race times have been updated. There are some of you who are wanting to run the Seattle Marathon now that you have finished one recently. I've put together a training plan for you, if you would like a copy let me know and I'll send it to you.


For those of you wanting to improve your speed and times over 5 and 10K I've added plans for that on the web site. They're not designed around a specific race but would be great to follow after a few months of marathon training. Improvng your 5 and 10K times wil help you improve your marathon times. I also added more training plans to next years schedule.


Now that many of you have run your big race of the fall and are planning for the future now is a good time to sit back and look at your race and training leading up to it. If you ended the race with the results that you had hoped for congrats, if on the other hand you didn't get what you thought you should have do you think it might have been from not running the race properly, like going out too fast and doing the big death. did you go out too slow and just leave too much in the tank. These are easy to fix, you just have to plan better and more importantly stick with your plan, at least you should have come away with a good idea of what you can and can't do race wise.


Another thing that can happen is that you have great plan and prepared to stick with it and then things that you can't necessarily plan for happen like what happened to those who ran in the mid west last week or those who ran Boston, the weather doesn't cooperate. You just have to adjust and make the most of the situation and unfortunately adjusting your goal to slower than you planned, a good idea because if you don't you'll probably fail and it will be a long day. Something to consider for those of you running Seattle next week. More than likely the weather will be fine but there is a chance that it will be bad. I would set two goals for the race just in case. The bottom line though the best thing to do is adjust for the conditions and remember there are more races to be run.


Now another thing that can happen is that you plan for the race, prepare properly, the weather cooperates and you come away with a poor performance. That one is hard to deal with to a certain degree. Sometimes no matter how well you prepare you can just go out and run a stinker. I've got no advice for this one if I did i could have used it myself a couple of times.


Ok so you're sure you prepared properly , the weather cooperated and you didn't come away with the time you wanted. I have a couple of observations and suggestions. If you want to run Faster you have to run Faster ,meaning that if you've PR'd in your last marathon and you want to pr again you'll have to run faster in your training. This means your training runs will need to be slightly faster, your time trials and races will have to be a little faster, everything in your training will have to be a little bit more challenging so when it's race time you're up to the challenge of getting another PR.


Just because you have been following a "Chuckit Training Plan" doesn't mean that you'll run faster in the next race than the last race you ran. You have to put more effort into it. One way to increase the effort in your in your training to race more, especially 5 and10K's as they work your strength and speed and you can recover quickly from them.. If you get faster for those then it goes to follow that you'll be faster for your marathons and half's.


One last thing to consider is makeing sure that you are properly rested for your race, many people make the mistake of over training leading up to there big race. The fact that most training plans build in a 3-4 week taper shows you how important it is. If you're tired going into a longer race you'll most definetly have long day. You either done the work by the time the tapering is needed or you haven't you can't make up for it over the last couple of weeks.


Anyway I wrote a lot here and I may have confuse some of you, if so let me know and I can explain it one on one.


Don't forget about the Water stop that we run at the Seattle Marathon. If you're in town that weekend we can use your help and if you haven't helped before you'll find it's a pretty good time. Contact Glen if you want to help glendor48@hotmail.com