I could pretty much cut and paste what I wrote after last year's WDW Marathon and have that be this post. Undertrained, not prepared, didn't put in the miles needed for the distance. All those points are still true. I'm not trying to run 1000 miles this year though. That could be a real difference maker. Let's explore.
I started 2022 focusing on distance. Miles were my primary target. Nothing about pace, form, effort level came with that goal. Just run 5 miles on Tuesday, 5 miles on Thursday, and 10 miles on Saturday and I will achieve that goal. I followed that pattern the third week of January. I had the marathon the first week and was recovering from the marathon effort the second week. I was in Richmond the fourth week of the month so no long run on Saturday. I managed one week with that pattern in February. Another Richmond trip and I started to cut the runs shorter. I got up too late one Tuesday which forced me to go longer on Thursday. I got up too late on Saturday so it was too hot for 10 miles by the time I got out the door. I was tired. Who knows why I started cutting the runs short. I just did.
This plan to get back to running faster (as laid out in my Marathon #3 post) overlooked a couple of very important factors. I essentially extended marathon training. I gave myself 1 week to recover physically, but I never really put down that obligation to go out and get in a bunch of miles. I had already felt like I failed in sticking to my marathon plan. Now I was pretty much failing on a new plan right from the outset. If I had just stopped to take a look at what I was going to be doing over the next several months, I would have seen that long weekend runs, the linchpin of this whole distance plan, weren't going to happen at least one weekend a month. The plan failed for oversight of some pretty obvious facts.
So the 1000 miles in a year plan failed because I put pressure on myself for volume and failed to plan for important life events. If I wanted to get faster, why didn't I plan for some short runs that would allow me to work on speed? My previous marathon training cycle started with prepping for a 10K in the spring. I shifted away from long runs to shorter, faster runs. That set my level for easy runs at a faster pace when I started marathon training. Instead I just found ways to keep myself slow (relative to previous running paces). I always felt pressure to get in the miles.
Until looking just now, I did not realize how little I ran after April. I basically didn't run at all from May to August. It wasn't until I started ramping up my Saturday runs to 10 miles that I was regularly running on the weekend. Wow. I made the joke that I was finally in shape to do my marathon plan about three quarters of the way through it. That was the truth!
Moral of the story. Give myself the space to do shorter, faster runs early in the year. Stay consistent through the year, and actually be ready for marathon training in mid-September.
