Running Long

I just finished up the 4th week of my marathon training program with an 11 mile run this morning. It was a beautiful morning for a run. Clear skies led to a gorgeous sunrise (almost as beautiful as my wife...but not quite). Light winds and temperatures around freezing made it a little cold, but I would rather run in these conditions then the heat and humidity of late summer.

Although my pace was a little slower then I would have liked, I was very pleased with how well I felt throughout the entire run. My first race of the year, the Leprechaun Chase 10K, is just a week away and I'm really looking forward to kicking things off for the year. Since my focus is on the marathon in June, I'm not setting a goal time for the races prior to that, but I do plan to run those races hard.

I've been doing an excellent job on keeping up with my strength training for the year so I decided to step it up this week. I started incorporating a lot more lower body lifts and variations including squats and lunges. Needless to say, my hamstrings, glutes, and  quads have been extremely sore. In fact my legs didn't get get stretched out until 6 miles into my run this morning. I'm going to keep challenging myself during my strength training sessions to help improve any imbalances that I have.