It’s no secret, I’ve been in bad attitude land with Marathon training; it’s cold and windy and I haven’t felt like putting forth real effort yet.  But I’ve been working my way back.

One of the things I started yesterday was to add 3 MP miles to my run.  I was severely lacking in race pace miles last time and that’s something  I want to correct this time out.  I figured I’d add a bit each week, next week do 5, the next week do 8, etc.  Seemed a good way to ingrain the pace without any stress.

Meanwhile, the days are ticking by and I needed to get a plan underway, so today I bought Pfitzinger’s second edition of Advanced Marathoning.  I used his first edition for Steamtown and had heard this new one had more MP miles, so I pretty much decided that’s what I’d use.

But when I finally looked at the plan and saw that there were exactly 4 MP runs and the first one should have been last week and was 8 miles at MP (8 MP in week 16?) I wasn’t happy.  Seems like 8 MP so early in the game would be better replaced by a tempo run, since it’s going to feel about as sucky anyway and give more physiological benefit.  But I digress.

More importantly, I don’t want to reserve MP miles for “special”  and with only four of them (3 actually, since I already missed one) it qualifies as that, because for me at this time, that would defeat the purpose of doing them.  I italicize that because I’m sure if I’d have picked up the book 6 months ago, I’d have no quibble with 4 big MP runs (save for the natural dread involved), but at this point they only look like drudge workouts.  Besides, I don’t want to dread MP runs, I want to get used to them so it ain’t no big deal, that’s my whole goal here.

Then I remembered ole Hal Higdon.  I’ve always dismissed his plans for looking too simplistic: they don’t have “cycles”, the mileage is low, the workouts are basically the same thing with more reps each week.  However, one thing I’ve always thought was pretty cool was that he has MP runs almost every Saturday before the LR, which works two-fold, you get your MP miles while at the same time it tuckers you out a bit for Sunday’s LR, the better to give you that marathon feeling.  And he even has some mid-week MP runs as well.  All told, he has 17 MP runs in an 18-week plan!  And they graduate from short to longer, just like I wanted to do.

So I started looking longer at his Advanced Plan II and wonder of wonders…the spark began to return.  His simplicity was suddenly a fantastic thing in my eyes: I could easily add mileage to it, the fact that it alternates tempo, hill and intervals each week while adding an additional short tempo or pace run a couple days later seemed perfect, plus, I’m going to keep some rest days in there.  It was exactly a year ago that I went to 7 days, but marathon training in the winter is going to annoy me double, so having a day off for especially windy/crappy days will be a treat.

And only three 20s instead of 4.  Will I be under prepared?  I don’t think so, those MP runs are going to be a great help.  My pal RedDogRunning from the 3:20 thread just used it (only did two 20s, matter of fact) and had a huge PR last week – said those MP runs made him feel “locked into pace the whole way”.  Music to my ears.

So I feel like training again!  No longer overwhelmed or dreading it, the little thrill was back when I transcribed the numbers and notes into my Excel calendar (and I did this twice today…the Pfitz time wasn’t so joyful).  Thank god, because I was seriously wondering how I was going to get through the next 4 months doing something I didn’t want to do.

Yay.  Just yay.

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