David Chiu

It was pouring rain when I woke up this morning so I wasn’t really looking forward to the 14 mile group run. Luckily the rain stopped and then only drizzled for brief periods during the rest of the run. When we started our 14 mile trek, around mile 3 I could tell this wasn’t going to be a good run. Fortunately my knee and my ankle wasn’t bothering me, but I felt tired. I know it’s partly because I haven’t been keeping up with the training runs during the week. For the past two weeks I haven’t done any running except for the long group runs on the weekends. Since I was experience pain in my ankle and knee I figured I should cut back on my miles so I could recover. I figured that at an 11.45 group pace I should still be able to keep up with the group even though I wasn’t training during the week. Obviously I was wrong. This morning I was able to keep pace with the group up to mile 10, but then my legs felt too tired to keep up and my feet started to hurt. So I basically walked the last 4 miles from Marina del Rey back to Venice beach. This doesn’t give me a lot of confidence for marathon day. I’m definitely going to have to up my training and mileage over the next few weeks to have any hope of finishing the marathon at a decent pace.

There are now 41 days left to the marathon. My focus will be nutrition, recovery and training. Nutrition can help speed recovery so I will eat clean for the next 41 days but will allow myself 1 cheat meal during the week. My diet will consist of 5 meals a day with the largest meal being breakfast. I’ll limit myself to whole-grain carbs mainly at breakfast, lots of fruits and veggies and good lean protein such as eggs, fish and chicken. For training, other than increasing mileage I’ll have to do more stretching and cross-training during the week.

Next weekend is a 17 mile group run. Hopefully I can recover and get in enough training to complete it. Right now though my knee hurts, my feet hurt and I have huge blisters on both feet.