After this week, I’m 1/3 of the way through my 18-week training plan! This is my first time not doing a 16-week one, but I didn’t do much while on vacation the second week so it really doesn’t feel like that long.

Monday 8/9: Rest day

Tuesday 8/10: Speed workout day on the track. 1 mile warmup, 3x400m with 200m walking rest, cooldown mile for 3.5 miles total. Upper body strength and core at the apartment gym – shoulder press is so hard. I’m so weak at that.

Wednesday 8/11: Full body strength at the nice gym – deadlifts and Smith machine squats. Then 4.7 easyish miles on the apartment gym treadmill. These double days are tough but it’s great to get them done.

Thursday 8/12: Rest day and flight home to visit my parents in Richmond VA. Steamed Chesapeake Bay Blue crabs for dinner

Friday 8/13: 3.2 steamy gross AM miles around their neighborhood. It was a heat wave down there as well as back home, so this would have sucked anywhere. Bojangles fried chicken sandwich after since I can’t get that in the Northeast!

Saturday 8/14: I scrapped my plans for an attempted long run since the heat wave persisted and I got up too late (love how waking up after 7am is considered late for me once again). I drove to a nearby park so I could finally try to capture a spot on the women’s Course Record list on Strava. Spoiler alert: I couldn’t tell exactly where the 0.42 mile loop began and ended, so I full on yeeted 2 loops of it, hoping that one would count. Well, it worked! I ended up #5 all time on the list for women, and also raised the Critical Power on my Stryd by several points. My Stryd has a race predictor and it’s slowly decreasing its estimated time for the marathon as well as my tuneup races.

Sunday 8/15: 6:15am flight out of Richmond, and home by 8:18am. Ate a lot of the delicious mid-Atlantic junk food I’d gotten from Wawa and lazed around with the pup for many hours. Abandoned all hope of doing my long run. Eek.

Total: 14.4 miles out of a planned 21 (of the Hal Higdon Novice 2 plan, I’m somewhere between that and the Intermediate 1 plan). I was on track if I had done my 12-mile long run. I’m mostly just trying to hit the minimum upper 30’s/crack 40 miles per week by September.