It's Friday!

Thank goodness it's Friday. This week has been good on the training front. I'm just getting back into the swing of things after the 60K. Jared and I have worked out a training schedule for the Empire State Building Run Up/Febapple 50 Mile. We're trying to do 5 days per week: 1 long run (18-20 miles), 1 medium run (5-7 miles), 1 day of speedwork and 2 days of stairwork with strength on 2 of those days. We both agreed that it's an ambitious plan but decided to give it a try. We'll rework if it proves to be too much.

We started on Wednesday morning with strength and 86 flights of stairs on the stairclimber. In case you haven't guessed, that's how many flights are in the Empire State Building. It took approximately 16 minutes on the stairclimber. Thursday was more strength and sprints. Jared concocts all our workouts because he's the workout guru. We did negative pull-ups and something called "Fight gone bad" which is supposed to simulate how one might feel after an MMA fight. Minus the bruises and injuries, of course. Supposedly the negative pull-ups will help me achieve my lifetime goal: doing one pull-up. That's what Jared claims. Only time will tell if his theory is correct. Friday we did a 5 mile run in the morning.

The stairclimber exercise provided us with an interesting (if inaccurate) baseline for the ESBRU. It really can't be considered accurate because the stairclimber has two rails. I leaned on them quite a bit, and this provided more upper body support than I can hope to have during the actual race. In the actual race we'll be lucky to have access to one rail and I certainly wouldn't be able to brace myself on it when the going would get tough. I've heard the start of the race can get messy as it's not broken up into corrals like most NYRR races. It's just one big clump of people trying to run and claw and scratch their way to the top first.

If tri swims are any indication, I'm a terrible clawer and scratcher and will probably be getting more of that than I'll be giving. I'll take it, though. The idea of racing up the Empire State Building is really exciting!

Well that's all for today. Stay tuned tomorrow (which is really later today) when I'll cover some first-time marathon tips.