15 miles today!

Ran 15 miles this morning in 2:19:00 or a 9:19 pace. The goal of these long runs is to get the miles in. Sometime people will say "You ran 15 miles but at that pace, you wouldn't beat Ryan Reynolds' time". For all of the non-marathon runners out there, you can't run every run at your race pace. If you did, you would either get burned out or injured. You are supposed to run your long runs at 1:00 to 1:30 minutes slower per mile than your race pace.

Only 69 days until the marathon!

I managed to work the loops out so that the last 3 miles are the exact last 3 miles of the NYC marathon. I thought it would help with visualization. I also ran those 3 miles at race pace or 8:25. Felt really strong. Here's a map of the last miles. Central park is pretty hilly but running it clockwise seems to be somewhat easier. I'm going to try and make this the finishing part of all of my long runs. By the time the marathon gets here, I will have seen and felt this part 8 or 9 times.

My training schedule for long runs looks like this going forward:

Saturday, August 29th - 18 miles
Sunday, September 6th - 20 miles
Sunday, September 13th - 16 miles
Sunday, September 20th - 22 miles
Sunday, September 27th - 15 miles (in London)
Sunday, October 4th - 22 miles
Sunday, October 11th - 15 miles
Sunday, October 18th - 13 miles
Sunday, October 25th - 8 miles

I'm planning 3 runs of 20 miles or more with two of them being 22 miles. Yikes!!

Have a great day!