Author: Mark Allman

It was warm enough to switch to cross-training on the bike. Put in about 5.25 miles on one of my hills routes. I’d like to work in a cross-training day on the bike each week.

It’ll be interesting to see how my leg reacts, since it isn’t a running/pounding type of workout. I moved the long run (12 miles) to tomorrow.

13 weeks until the Mad Marathon. Weight: 153.1.

6.2 miles on a rather flat route, a 9:26 pace (faster than the 9:50 “easy” pace), on a nice, sunny morning.

One of the things I’m also targeting is to get some excess weight off. Aren’t we all, eh? It’s interesting how much our weight varies. Two days ago it was 153.0, yesterday it was 155.2 and today it was 149.6. My goal is to get to 140 in time for the Mad Marathon on July 12th. 95 days an counting.

As others are experiencing, I’m having a hard time getting to sleep at night. All the COVID-19 impacts are not easy to stop thinking about late at night. It makes getting up at 4AM or 5AM to hit the pavement a bit challenging. Hopefully I can get the schedule back to my early morning normal! After all, one of these days we’ll all be commuting back to the office during rush hour.

Good route today. Just under 8 miles (7.97 or so) with 425 feet of vertical. One tiny benefit to the “stay at home” environment that we’re all in is that the roads are nowhere near as busy. Today only one idiot got close with their truck.

14 weeks from today is the Mad Marathon in VT. 2350 total vertical, including two 1.4 mile climbs of around 380 feet each in the first nine miles. Today’s training pays off on race day. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Good weather: at around 8AM it was around 35 degrees, winds not strong, mostly to partly cloudy. A pretty much flat 7.15 route at 9:45 felt fine.

I figure that the upcoming races in May will be cancelled. Nuts! With this, I’ve decided to redo the training plan to get very ready for the climbs of the Mad Marathon in July in Vermont. It starts with two 1.5-mile climbs, around 380 feet each, in the first 9 miles. After that there’s still lots of vertical, including a steep dip (that you run going out at mile 13 and coming back at mile 22.4) called “Cabot’s Dip” that looks like a roller coaster.

The training plan will target a 4:00:00 Mad Marathon finish (43 minutes faster than last year), and will include lots of hills work. It’ll also include targets for weight to try to slim down and drop the excess. Every pound dropped is one less dragged around 26 miles!

The automated tools are written to extract the training schedule for the upcoming next few weeks from my training spreadsheet. I’ll work out the bugs over the next few weeks. I automate everything I can.