Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Pumping Iron

Since the start of this marathon training has us only running 4 days a week (but also starts with 2 more miles/week than we have been doing at 5 days a week ) Jason and I were able to get to YMCA to pump some iron today since they were closed on Monday.

We did three sets of dips, pullups, bicep, triceps, shoulders, bench press, leg press, lower back. Then we finished the day off with some situps. All with a little amount of weight but lots of reps. I am going to search for a book or website which talks about weight lifting for runners. We can only get to the gym at the most twice a week and with schedules they way tend to get possibly only once a week. So I'm not doing the, we are going to do legs today, shoulders tomorrow, triceps the day after that. I will have to get all exercises in each day we go. If anyone has a book/website/recommendation please let me know in the comments.

Tomorrow we have a 9 mile run, then Friday off, 4 mile recovery on Saturday and 12 mile long run on Sunday. The end of this week is going to get a bit crazy because I have to be at the lab on Friday from ~8am-midnight then again on Saturday from 9am-early afternoon. Needless to say, I'm happy we have Friday off and only a recovery run on Saturday.

7 comments:

Jason said...

In case anyone was wondering, I'm totally huge now.

Anonymous said...

Interesting the plan only has you running 5 days a week. Are you using the Pfiztinger plan?

How many miles do you two normally do and what will this plan peak out at?

This marathoning stuff has me curious....

LeahC said...

Hi John-

Yes we are using the Pfitzinger plan that can be found in the book Advanced Marathoning by Douglas and Pfitzinger. This plan will peak at 55 miles in one week. Last year I am guessing we probably only peaked at about 40 miles in our longest week.

For what we do usually...hmm go to this post http://jasonleahrun.blogspot.com/2006/05/notes-from-great-weekend.html and see the plots at the bottom. That's graphically talking about what we have done so far this year. We have slowly been building up to being able to run around 30 miles per week and were going 5 times a week.

The plan will be 4 days a week for the first 2 weeks and then adds in another day. 3/5 days will be harder runs (tempo, fartlek, V02 Max training, pace runs & long runs) The other two days of the week are recovery runs. Then the other 2 days of the week are either cross training or rest. I think we'll try and bike and lift weights on those days or rest our legs depending on how we are feeling.

You should totally (!) do a marathon. Chicago's already closed though :-(

Anonymous said...

Thanks. You two probably have a lot of room for improvement. I think that if you desire to build up to running consistently 6-7 days a week you will continue to see significant improvement. Good luck!

LeahC said...

at this point after looking at lots of different programs I am going to stick with what's in the book. I think i need the two rest/xtraining days because my schedule tends to be insane and so i like have the room to move runs around if I have to.

I think we will improve tons this summer just by doing speedwork (we didn't do ANY last summer) and more miles per week in general. We are almost starting at our max weekly milage from last year.

If you are interested in the Pfitz programs there are two more styles of programs which max at 55-70 mpw or 70+ mpw. I think these have running most days if not twice a day....maybe one day for us in the future when we get really fast :-)

Anonymous said...

Good luck with the weekend runs.

SRR said...

Ouch...those are long work hours.
Great job lifting weights!