Hotfoot PM – 2008 New York City Marathon Training Blog

Finished up another week with a solid long run last Sunday, 18 milesalongside the rivers of Pittsburgh with my good friend Jeff Babich. I met up with Jeff right about mile 4 on the South Side and we completed the run together (he was only looking to do about 14). It was slow going at first, legs felt like jelly, but half-way through I got a second wind and was able to muscle through it. Thanks for mapping out the run and making it happen Jeff!

So I finished up with 37.5 miles for the week (a mile and a half over the goal of 36) and had a great 15 mile bike ride with my lovely lady friend Wendy that filled my cross-training quota for the week. I was also able to catch 3 baseball games at PNC Park in the New York Mets vs. Pittsburgh Pirates series. This is not a Mets baseball blog, so I won’t go off on too much of a tangent, but suffice to say the Met’s looked great in 3 of 4 games. Once again it was the wobbly bull pen that gave up a 2 run lead late in the fourth game on Monday and that led to the only loss, but after a 6 game winning streak, I can’t complain.

One of my new favorite aspects of PNC Park this year is the Water Taxi. For 6 bucks you get a round trip ticket from my apartment building right to the game. Here’s a pic of the inside with some fellow Mets fans…

For this week it’s 40 miles with a long run of 20 on Sunday. I feel as if I’m not being challenged enough though and may push it further. In the past I may have over-trained so I want to avoid that, but so far, I’ve run further than I had planned for 2 weeks in a row…

I’ve been tracking my heart rate with all of my runs and my recovery times have been improving. I’ll typically end my runs with a HR of 180 or so, and within 2 minutes it will drop about 40 bpm (beats per minute). When I started building a base back in March, the recovery would be roughly 20-25 bpm. In general I’m maintaining an average heart rate of about 170. Still researching what my target heart rate should be for race day, so more to come on this topic.