Update on training for Portland

I seem to be at a lack of interesting things to say.  So under the guise of "this blog is record of my running history" I figured I should check in on how training is going for Portland.

Things are going well--not incredible, but well.  I'm hitting all my runs without having to do crazy rescheduling of runs or life.  Tempo runs continue to be an issue for me: it is the one type of run that disagrees with my stomach (and I wonder if it has become psychological trigger at this point).  I thought that I hadn't been able to get my repeats down to my fastest speeds, but after comparing against my training this time last year, I actually am on par with my better times and have actually cranked out a few new records for training splits.  I've also noticed that my long runs have gone exceptionally well: the most difficulty I've had was yesterday's 17 miler, and that was mostly because I had to do a series of loops at the end to make my mileage and meet up with Wifey.

Ever since I threw out a perfectly good pair of shoes, I've been running in the same Brooks Adrenalines for every run. This is the first time in years that I've only used one pair of shoes and I feel like I'm blasting through this pair.  And my feet have noticed it too: all of a sudden I'm getting all these new aches and pains in parts of my feet that never hurt.  All this means that I have to order a second pair ASAP.

This definitely has not been a repeat of training for NYCM.  I made leaps and bounds during that training cycle because it was the first time I had trained entirely outdoors (no scheduled treadmill runs).  But, even more importantly, it has been a huge improvement over my last training cycle in preparation for Delaware.  This has been a much more positive experience and I definitely feel better about my running this time around.  However, Delaware did lead to a PR come race day--which makes me wonder if I might need some of the bad training to have something to work against on race day.