Fight For It

My new running mantra has become, "Fight For It." I was previously getting a bit down about the loss of fitness the whole fall-on-head-ankle-debacle cost me. And every day I was out there and things were feeling tough, I'd repeat it in my head to buckle down and just keep plugging away. It made me channel my anger and frustration into good running. Let me tell you, it works. I've used "Believe" in the past which was awesome during races and pulled me through. But I currently like the bite of tenacity and empowerment behind "Fight For It" more right now. I intend to use this one for a bit. There is an awesome story about the above tank which I'll post this Friday.

My running has been going really well and pace-wise I am pretty much back to where I'd like to be at this point in training. If I'm being honest I am amazed at how quickly it came back and I am excited to get on to the meat of training.

I took a good hard look at my tentative training schedule last night and already feel the need to revamp it. I'm a little ahead of the curve right now and want to keep building on that, mileage-wise. Originally I was treating June as a freebie month where I was following the beginning weeks of my usual marathon training schedule. Then, at the end of the month I was going to repeat those initial weeks when I jumped back into official training.

I think I need to treat these weeks as the first few weeks of official training to get my mileage up higher before ET in August. ET is a total training run with no real time goal. However, it is at altitude and is all uphill the first 13 miles. I want to put myself in the best position to perform well under the altitude+uphill combo.

Two, I am having some misgivings about running Half Moon Bay AND Two Cities/Fresno. A part of me feels that the races are too close together. I was looking at CIM in December which would give me another extra month of training. It would also open up the Humboldt Half question and allow me to get a good half marathon race on the schedule. But I reread some friend's CIM reports (and also my own) which pretty much made me NOT want to rerun that course. I think my heart is with Fresno this year.

So this leads me to think about how I want to approach Half Moon Bay. I don't think I can race both Half Moon Bay and Fresno. I don't even think it is wise for me to set a semi-aggresive time goal for Half Moon Bay (I was thinking maybe something in the 4:15 range, initially). I have to either throw in an easy 4:35 effort or maybe drop down to the half. If I decide to just go for it at Half Moon Bay, I suppose Fresno would be a moot point. I'll have to see how things shape up the next few months.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be very much appreciated!