Nice week

One of the best things about running the marathon, though there are many, is the week after running.  You get to relax, recover, and retell the story of the race to all your friends.  I know a lot of people take the day off after the marathon to recover at home.  Not me.  I was looking forward to going to work and seeing everybody, accepting their kind congratulations, and sharing my experience.

It's been a nice week.  I ran once easy and ate hard!  Runner's World magazine has a poll in this month's issue.  One question is about how long most runners believe they should be allowed to eat desert (guilt-free) following a marathon.  The winning answer was one week.  That sounds about right to me.  I'm already starting to get a little restless.

The marathon forces us to follow a pretty rigid schedule, and be pretty structured with our training.  I tried to take it low-key with my training, but there's still no way around the need to run really long on the weekend, and hard at least once during the week.  And once the race is over, it can be hard to keep that discipline. 

That's why I personally don't like to take too long of a break, physically or mentally after the marathon.  I am planning a regular ten miler tomorrow with my training partners.  For Tom, it's his last easy run before running New York next weekend.  I know he's encouraged by my marathon that he will run well there.  We have the same training base. 

Tom is offering a bonus to readers of this blog, by the way.  He will be starting in the same area as Lance Armstrong, and will likely run close to the same pace for at least part of the race.  He's promised to take notes and share them with me.  And, of course, I'll share them with you!  Maybe we'll get some good gossip!  I reread the Runner's World interview with Lance, and saw that while he's not running real long, he is doing cross training.  And he did do an 18:20 5k a couple months ago, without really trying very hard.  So I'm really fascinated to see what kind of marathon time he turns out.

Anyway, enjoy the fall running!  Maybe I'll see you at the Trick or Treat trot on Sunday.