Welcome to week 3 of our Marathon Training Blog series! Click here to start with the first week.

Week 3:

Monday: REST! We’re pros at resting. We can rest like nobody’s business.

Tuesday: 3 miles in 31m, 15s with an average of 10:25 min/mi. We ran at the gym because we’re trying to save me from some of the crazy heat. This morning at 5:00 am it was 75 degrees and 94% humidity. DREADFUL. The gym was lovely and cool and I ran right under the fan. Hoping this will help with the crazy fatigue tonight (read my last post to know what I’m talking about)!

Wednesday: Crosstrain! This week, we went to the gym, did 500 meters of rowing (roughly 5 mins), 10 mins on the Arc Trainer, and then 3 sets of 10 of each of these rotations: plank (30 seconds), medicine ball side sit ups (is there a technical name for this??), walking lunges, and kettle bell squats. May not sound like much, but holy smokes we were sore!

Thursday: 4 miles in 43m, 35s with an average of 10:54 min/mi. We ran at the gym again because it was hot and a little rainy. Mentally, it’s a hard jump from 3 to 4 on a treadmill at 5:00 am when you’ve been used to 3s… so today I took the first mile slow and then pretended I was just starting when I hit 1 mile :). That seemed to help! I know I’ll get used to running 4s on weekdays again… I did in the past! There’s just a lot of new for us with this training plan. We’re adding a recovery run the day after our normal runs and upping our cross train game. Praying I can stick with it all!

Friday: CT or Rest. We chose rest again! It’s been a busy week and we were proud of our cross train and extra miles put in. We’ve got an even busier weekend planned and thought it best to take the extra hour of sleep. I’m glad we did!

Long Run Saturday–6 miles in 1:09:09 with an average pace of 11:32 min/mi. Our friend was back with us and we got the most awesome news ever this week–he’s going to join our team running in Detroit and take a 6.7 mile leg in one of our Marathon Relays!  We have a total of four teams and we had been struggling to fill that last spot. I was so floored when he said he wanted to join us! We may not actually get to run with him that day, but we LOVE training with him and he’s just an all-around, super awesome dude and I’m just floored that he wants to help us raise awareness for this dumb disease and help us fight it! I’ve been humbled time and time again by how much our dear friends and family care about us. I can’t wait until October!

Sunday: 3 mi EZ. We WALKED 3 miles in 50ish mins with an average of  17 min/mi. We were set to jog, but we had put the run off until later in the day and it was very hot and my stomach had been upset all weekend. About .1 mile in, I knew we either had to walk or scrap the whole thing. I walked the whole 3 miles with bad side stitches off and on, but we finished. Some days, that’s all it’s about. I love to break personal records and end with a post-worthy time, but sometimes you have to just put one foot in front of the other. It’s about not giving up. It’s about doing what you can for as long as you can.

So, the final assessment of week 2:

I took off 10 points for the walk on Sunday so 90%! A minus! I’ll take it!  Last week felt good. We have some of the normal training sore spots setting in and we’re trying to stay on top of those. For me, it’s making sure I spend a crazy amount of time on stretching my left hip after a run and spend a ton of time on strengthening my quads in cross train. If I slip up on either of those, my hip gets more and more stiff and that causes knee pain and tail bone pain and then I’m a mess!  We want to avoid all of that!

3 weeks down, 17 to go!