Virtual MCM Training – Week 9

I am training for the Marine Corps Marathon, which will be held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My race day will be on October 18. We did some major route planning/mapping this week and now I’m really excited for race day!

Monday – Rest

Tuesday – 4 miles easy
There seems to be an unusually high number of grasshoppers right now. They are always all over the trail at this park and they hop all over the place while I run around the 0.6 mile loop again and again.

Wednesday – 8 mile workout
After a long warm up, I did 3 x 5 minutes at half marathon pace followed by 3 x 5 minutes at 10K pace, and then a cool down. My legs felt strong during this workout and I felt like I had good energy. All of the pick-up paces felt comfortable for the 5 minute duration.

Thursday – Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred, Level 2 workout
It had been awhile since I did a Jillian workout. It felt good to get in a mix of strength and cardio.

Friday – 5 miles easy
It was a very dreary, rainy day and I was pretty tempted to do this run on the treadmill. But I took a new pair of trail shoes out of the box on Tuesday and I couldn’t resist taking them for another run. Plus, I knew with the weather I’d likely have the trails to myself. Sometimes I enjoy camaraderie out there, but other times I love not seeing another soul and just being alone in the woods.

The Yeti 100 miler was going on Friday through Saturday, and I was sending those runners good vibes on my run. Rain is probably better than heat and humidity, but hours and hours of rain definitely gets miserable. Days like this remind me of Crooked Road from last year.

Saturday – 20 mile long run
This was my fifth 19-20 mile long run in a row. I’m holding up alright physically, but mentally it was definitely starting to feel like a grind. I met up with Kim and once again we had good long run weather – low 60’s and cloudy.

We saw some crazy nature stuff during run, including nearly being run over by a deer that was running up the trail away from something, a kamikaze squirrel, and a big tree falling in the woods off in the distance.

This run ended up being my fastest 20 miler of this training cycle, and we even knocked 8 minutes off of last week’s 20. We started with 7 miles easy, then 6 miles at 30 seconds slower than marathon goal pace (MGP), 1 mile easy, 4 miles at MGP, 1 mile easy, and then the final mile was faster than MGP. It was a lot of work, but I’m proud of us for hitting all of those paces during the run!