Training in Montana

6 TM miles at the Y this morning. Schedule calls for 10, will try and do 4 at lunch. Lots of snow yesterday and today so my wife didn't want our eldest to drive to school so that ate up a bunch of my morning. Legs felt pretty sluggish today after Saturday's long run. After 3 miles I walked for a quarter mile then got back to running. That helped quite a bit.

5 TM miles at the Y after work. My legs are pretty sore after the weekend run so I again walked 1/4 mile halfway through. That did the trick and i finished strong.

25 pushups and sit-ups.

45 tempo minutes on the home TM this morning. I nearly skipped this workout as I was tired and thought I'd be too tired to run after last evening's five. Turns out I was wrong so I'm glad I woke up.

Started at 6 mph, then bumped up to 6.5, 7.0, 7.5. At 17:00 I went up to 9.3 mph for a 10 minute fast run. It was hard but not impossible. After those minutes I was happy to bump down to 8.0 for a couple minutes, then 7.5 for the remainder.

Rest day for me, and a realization day. I need the help of my fellow bloggers. I am trying to do too much with my life right now, and I need to simplify my marathon training. I'm following the Advanced 1 Hal Higdon plan  (days of the week modified to have Sunday a rest day) and I'm on week 11. I need to reduce my weekly mileage.

I'm leaning towards keeping my Wednesday workouts and my Saturday long runs the same distance and just reducing the other days. How much can I reduce the M, Tu, F mileage without seeing a massive loss in training?

I realize this will likely impact my marathon time, but that's okay. I'm investing too much of my energy (physical and mental) into the marathon and I need to diversify. :(

9 TM miles at home this morning as more snow piled up outside. Ugh. Having a record-breaking snow year the winter that I'm training for a Spring marathon has been interesting. Without a home treadmill I could not do it.

Ran to 1 episode of Criminal Minds and the start of Prince of Persia.

I've been pondering the advice received yesterday about scaling back my running. Thanks to my blog friends for their help. I will ponder on it some more. I will likely play it week-to-week and even day-by-day so the advice given helps me feel at peace when I do scale back some workouts.

First of my 3 planned 20 milers.  Due to double digit below zero temps I did this on 2 TMs - 5 miles at home, then went to the Y with my family and did 15. It wasn't that bad today. I slept in this morning so was well rested and that helped a lot. Watching Vietnam War in HD on the History channel helped the time go quickly. The last 5 miles I ran at MP, with the last mile slightly faster than MP and I bumped up my speed the last 1/2 mile and finished the last 1/4 at 6:00 pace. A good run all around.