Winding Down

After two days rest, I breezed through six miles this afternoon on Corinth's Coca-Cola 10K loop. My goal for the St. Jude Marathon is to run it in under 4 hours. I ran a 3:52 my junior year of college. If I could run a sub-4 Saturday it would be like being 21 again. In order to get under four hours I will need to average a 9:10 minute-mile or better.

Nine-minute miles have gotten easier and easier over the last few months, but I haven't tried to run a nine-minute mile on a long run. I hope I can do it 26 times on Saturday. 

I've been training for St. Jude since last May. It feels good to be this close to reaching the goal. Last year, after I crawled across the St. Jude finish line I didn't run again for the rest of the winter. I gained 10 pounds and by the time I started running in May I felt like I had never even run the marathon. 

Not this year. 

I'm setting goals to keep myself in shape and hopefully achieve some new milestones. I feel like I'm in the best shape of my life and I don't want to lose it again. It helps that AB has started running. She is so excited about finishing the half marathon Saturday. I can't wait to train for the Country Music Marathon with her this winter. We have really enjoyed having something in common other than crying babies and favorite televisions shows. And I really can't wait until this summer when we start training for the Tranrockies Run! 

How do you train to run 125 miles in six days? Luckily, Transrockies offers this handy dandy training program, which AB and I plan to follow to the mile. Check it out. It's been so cold outside the last few days that I have been daydreaming about running on hot sunny days. There must be something wrong with me.