Training

My husband and I started training for our marathon in June 2009. We followed the Hal Higdon's Marathon Plan for Beginners. The Marathon plan has you run three days in a row, cross train and then rest before the long run on Sunday. Running three days in a row was a little too much for me, so we changed the plan a little bit and ran every other day and cross trained by swimming, biking or doing cardio at the gym. We always made sure to get in our long runs. The first long run is 6 miles according to Hal's plan. In the early summer we did our long runs in the mid morning to afternoon. In July and August when is started getting really hot we moved them to early Sunday morning, sometimes leaving at 6am. After running we would come home and stretch and then jump into our pool to cool down and get the blood out of our legs. Training for a marathon is a big commitment the time that goes into the training as well as not being able to do everything you want to. There were numerous occasions that we had to turn down invitation for a Saturday night event or not drink or leave early because of the long run the following morning. The training went well until mile 15. That was the furthest I had ever run before and after that run I had a constant dull pain in my heels. I went to the podiatrist who diagnosed it was plantar faciatis. They wrapped a piece of thin foam to my foot and told me to do some stretches or buy insoles. I didn't want to start running with insoles considering the marathon was about two months away.
I decided just to continue stretching and live with the pain. Despite the pain, every week I would look forward to the long Sunday morning runs because once we got out into the country it was very peaceful and I enjoyed being with my husband. It was something we could do together besides watching movies and going out to dinner. We eventually made it to our highest long runs. We were running 18, 20, 22 miles. We ran all around Madison and into neighboring small towns. My husband and I still talk about these runs. "Remember when we ran those 16 miles in the blistering heat, ran out of water and got lost?" I never thought that the long runs would be something I would cherish.
As the training was tapering, we were looking forward to our last long run, an 8 miler one week before the marathon. After runnig such long distances, 8 miles is nothing. Training was done and now we were anticipating the Redwoods Marathon.