Since tomorrow is my full rest day, today pretty much marks the end of my first training week (still have one yoga class to do, but it’ll have to wait until after sunset when the temperature is more tolerable). I don’t want to do one of these training logs every day, because that would bore both of us, but since there will be a brand new routine on Sunday, I thought I’d talk about my current state and review what has happened during the week.

At the moment I’m running for time rather than distance, and the goal this week was to work up to the point where I could run 15 minutes non-stop. As I mentioned before, the hanging-out-and-labeling technique pretty much saved the day. By using that I was able to hit my 15-minute goal in the second training session, and kept that consistent through the three subsequent runs. I hadn’t pre-measured how long my running distance was, because I’m not yet at the point where running for distance makes any sense, but just to give myself an idea of how much I should increase my time next week, I made a point of remembering my route this morning, and when I got home I measured it out on Google. The verdict: in 15 minutes I ran 1770 metres, or 1.1 miles. In other words, I can run about a third of a 5k in a quarter of an hour. That’s pretty slow, but considering it’s my first training week it’s not too bad.

Most of the training programs I’m constructing my regime from are between 25 and 30 weeks long, and require the runner to be able to run a 5k before starting the program. I now have a little over 36 weeks before the race date, so I still have some time to build myself up to a decent 5k pace, which at the rate I’m going should take 40 – 45 minutes. So the goal this week is to gradually build up from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. I don’t need to stagger long runs with short runs yet because even my long runs are still shorter than what would be considered to be a marathon trainee’s short run. Right now I just need to build, build, build. Given my progress in this first week, I’m feeling confident.

Now that the blister on my foot has healed (yay!), by far my worst enemy is the weather. Even at 4:50 in the morning when I run, the temperature is still in the high 20′s and I come home 15 minutes later red and overheated. Next week I’m going to set the alarm ten minutes earlier and spend some extra time drinking water before I go out. Luckily yesterday marked the shortest night of the year, so the darkness will inch forward over time and give me some extra breathing room in terms of trying to stay ahead of the sunrise. Of course, my runs will also be getting longer, so I don’t think a later sunrise means I’ll be able to start sleeping in. Such is the nature of commitment, though, and I keep telling myself that it isn’t forever. When winter comes, I can run in the afternoon if I want.

The biggest change I’ve noticed so far is that I’m constantly hungry— according to my food journal I’m eating about twice what I normally do, and yet I lost two pounds this week (which is good, I need to take this extra weight off). One of my marathon-running friends says that this is just the beginning, that it’ll get to the point where I’m eating pretty much all the time on non-rest days, including during runs. I truly enjoy eating, so I’m looking forward to that.

Note to fellow runners: if you run with music (the community seems to be strongly divided on this), I’d like to recommend the latest release from The Chemical Brothers, We Are The Night. Four of the songs from the CD made up the entirety of this week’s soundtrack, and the songs I didn’t use this week will form almost all of next week’s playlist, as well. I like to run with music that has vocals but no real “lyrics,” if you know what I mean. One or two repeated lines in a song is perfect for me, and this release fits the bill.

So, to recap:

Total running time this week: 75 minutes (1.25 hours)
Approximate distance covered: 8.85 km (5.5 miles)
Weight: down .9kg (2lbs)
Physical issues: one blister that healed without incident
Mental issues: none, feeling great

Next week is probably going to be the hardest, because it’s the only time in my entire program that I’ll have to run double what I ran in the previous week, even though that’s not a huge increase in raw distance. I’ve got a lovely rest day planned for tomorrow, though (hamam and pedicure), so hopefully with the massage and everything I’ll be well-prepared.

36 weeks to go.