Shot for the moon and landed amongst the stars type of day. I think every marathoner that shows up to the start line has story to tell and the journey is usually more impressive than the result itself. I knew I had to be as fit and healthy as possible to conquer both. On August 1st, I had my first injury in awhile after a high volume track session.
I felt the sharp pull in my foot in the last m of the final rep. I tried training on it, but eventually had to shut it down for a full week. Once the injury was under control and I was able to do workouts, but got covid shortly after. The timing was the worst possible: 3 weeks before Berlin. An injury AND covid made it a no brainer to scratch out of Berlin. While some will argue I could have ran this for fun and cross it off the "bucket list", I don't believe there's such thing as an easy marathon.
My goal was to run a marathon this season and I felt that running Berlin even if easy would require more time off and impact my recovery. Not ideal in anyway. Other changes that happened this year was I started working with Coach Mario Fraioli. I wanted a fresh perspective on how to train for my marathon goals not just for this season, but years from now and I knew he would be the right person to help me pursue those goals.
I adjusted my work schedule around training so I could fit in my double runs. I focused on recovery and went to bed at pm everyday. I wanted to go all in and see what I could get out of myself this season to hopefully, finish the year on a good note.
Training, for the most part, had gone really well. I was traveling in Italy 12 weeks out from CIM so it was certainly a challenge to wake up at am everyday on vacation to squeeze my training runs in. It ended up not being that bad since I got to explore so much of the every city, including the dolomites. I could hardly run it for 2 minutes. How was I supposed to run Every week of training, I journaled what I thought went well and what could be going better.
