3/4 Marathon Training Debriefing: Week 1 of 12

Okay, here's the sitch. I'm running a 3/4 marathon on October 5th. (That's 19.6 miles, and if you haven't heard of the distance before, that's because it's not a common race.) I set up a training schedule for myself, loosely based on Hal Higdon's marathon training schedule, and I just completed my FIRST WEEK! And it went SWIMMINGLY. (Runningly?)

So my new plan for a bi-weekly post is going to be posting the week's training schedule at the beginning of the week (Sunday) and then my recap/debriefing of the training that week will be posted on Saturday. Since we were out of town this weekend, here's the first debriefing!

This week, I was supposed to run a total of 9 miles during the week, and then my long training run on the weekend was to be 9 miles as well. In actuality, I ran 12.9 miles during the week, and did my 9-mile training run on Saturday morning. I'm still psyched about this, since we were on vacation this weekend and I still managed to stay committed to my training schedule!

We were in Rapid City for our good friends Mike and Abby's wedding, and I just gotta say, I. Love. The. Black. Hills. Every time I visit there (which has been every summer for the last three years), I decide that we'll live there someday. I'll do a post about the wedding sometime soon (omg, best wedding efvar, sorry to all my other friends who've already gotten married, but Mike & Abby totes win), but for now, here's a picture of what I found when I headed out of the hotel at 5:43 on Saturday morning.

Rapid City has some really nice trails; I hit up one near our downtown hotel which ran alongside a little creek, so I very much enjoyed my nine miles. I've been listening to Stephen King's Dark Tower series on my iPod and that definitely helps for the longer runs, when I might otherwise get bored. Listen to audiobooks when you run! Best thing I ever figured out!