Getting in Shape

Two summers ago, Patrick and I trained for the Gateway half marathon in Gateway, CO.

The drive to town, and the scenery during the race, were unbelievably beautiful and the run was really fun, but that was the last race we've done.  Last summer we did more hiking for hunting season than running, (and got pregnant!), and this year I was just coming off delivering a baby - not the best time to start training.  However, we are going to the beach before you know it, and both Patrick and I thought it was finally time to start running again.

With such a short summer here in the mountains, you have to start training in the spring (i.e. snow), which makes training 6 days a week hard to do.  We typically use skiing as our main activity on the weekends (both in-bounds and back-country), and keep a gym membership for working out during the week, until about the 1st of April.  Then we start training outside when the weather permits, which is usually only a couple of days each week.

Two years ago, this lead me to search for a training program that required only 3 days/week, and I happened upon the FIRST method (don't tell Pat it was in the Women's Running World). We had great success in increasing our distances and achieving our goal times, so I figured we could use it this summer to get in shape, even though we aren't really training for a race.

Right now, we're still working on being able to comfortably run 3 miles.  For me, it has been a real struggle - because most afternoons I would rather curl up on the couch with some wine, than push a stroller through the rain up a hill - but we're trying to keep up a consistent routine and have managed to hit the trail at least three times a week.  Since, I don't really want to train for a half marathon (13 miles), I am going to cut all of the training in half so that in 10 weeks I should be able to run 6.5 miles with the stroller in under an hour.

The Plan

Week	Tuesday	Wednesday	Sat/Sun
1	2x400	1.5-mile tempo	3-mile long run
2	2x800	2-mile tempo	4-mile long run
3	2x1600	2.5-mile tempo	5-mile long run
4	3x400	3-mile tempo	3-mile long run
5	2x1600	2-mile tempo	5-mile long run
6	2x800	4-mile tempo	4-mile long run
7	3x400	3-mile tempo	5-mile long run
8	2x1600	4-mile tempo	6-mile long run
9	2x800	1.5-mile tempo	3-mile long run
10	2x400	1-mile tempo	6.5 Mile Goal

(The full training plan can be found here).

The only remaining items to figure out are how we're going to keep Kate entertained while we're at the track, and what color swimsuit to buy.