Its been awhile since I posted something as I just returned from vacation this past week and then from some other travels around the state, but its never enough to keep me from sticking to my training.

I spent last week in North Wildwood, which means I got to run the beach, the boardwalk and all the little communities that I love so much. It was brutally hot though, even at 5:30 in the morning, but I got through it by taking lots of water with me on my mid-long runs. It was the first week of mesocycle 2, which added more organized speed training to my already built up endurance training. I really felt the burn of the workouts by Friday morning though.. I left the beach on Thursday to head towards Pittsburgh, but stopped and spent the night at a Hampton Inn in Somerset, PA since it was a long drive. I managed to find myself the hardest course I ran in a long time (not on purpose) .. it wiped me out totally for the week, not to mention that it was brutally hot out Friday morning. This course was hilly, windy and on narrow roads out in the country, it was kind of spooky…

This past week also started up what I call my “double sessions”, where I have a morning run and an evening run. Thankfully its only once a week I have to do them but it does offer some change to the normal routine and i’m convinced more than ever that I prefer running in the morning rather than in the evening. Anyway, its generally a shorter distance that I have to run in the evening (4-5 miles) and the “Advanced Marathoning” book states that doing recovery runs like this actually helps me recover faster .. for example instead of getting in 10 miles this morning, I did 6 this morning and 4 this evening. I’m not sure if it works or not, but I guess we’ll see in a few weeks.

The last major highlight is that my right knee has started to flair up again .. its not painful, just sore. It got this way back in 2006 and 2007 when i was working real hard on training, so its a good sign, I just have to not push it. I took an actual day off this weekend by not doing anything on Sunday, not even a bike ride. It felt good to not have to get up early or do anything physical.

So as the sun starts to rise later, it offers me cooler temperatures for my early morning runs. I did like running in the early morning sunshine, but I’d prefer to stay cool if I can. Hopefully as the weather heats up, it won’t hinder my training as I’m getting closer and closer to the Rochester marathon ..