Mesocycles

Today's run: Recovery run of 5 miles at 9:02 pace.
47 miles this week. Marathon is 13 weeks from today!

This morning brought a nice, warm, quiet run in the Mission today, featuring one and two-thirds Mission Loops. Almost surprisingly, I felt quite fine putting in the five slow miles after the 17-miler yesterday. It started to feel like it was no big deal to have run my longest run ever the day before, and suddenly it starts to seem like my eventual runs of 20 miles won't be that big a deal either. Okay, so is now the point where I have truly reached insanity?

I spent much of today's run thinking about Recovery, the next week, and the next part of the training plan. This was a Recovery run, and next week is termed a Recovery week (featuring no runs that will seem especially difficult). The logic is the same: use the run (or week) to set yourself right for the coming run (or weeks). So by backing off the intensity and the mileage for a week, I'll be ready for the next mesocycle.

The book I'm following, Advanced Marathoning, describes the mesocycles (sub-sections of the overall training plan) as follows:

• #1– Increasing mileage to improve pure endurance
• #2– Improving lactate threshold (and continue to improve endurance)
  
• #3– Race preparation
• #4– Taper and race the marathon
• #5– Recovery from the marathon

So, after this coming week, I'll start having many more lactate threshold runs, and it stands to be a challenging set of weeks. I'm very glad to have experimented and used the previous set of weeks to give me a good idea as to what pace to shoot for on the lactate threshold runs (especially including last Sunday's race, which really gave me the best guidance). I feel like it will be this cycle that will make the difference between meeting my goal and not doing so.