Let the Marathon Training Begin!

Today, after running errands and playing with 5 year olds all morning, I decided to take a look at the dates for the San Antonio Marathon that I've been telling people I'm going to run. I was very excited when I went to their website and saw that the charity is the Susan G. Komen foundation which funds breast cancer research. My sister was diagnosed with breast cancer back in the fall of 2005 and is now a 5 year survivor thanks in large part to the advances in treatment and diagnosis funded by groups like Komen.

I got on the website and saw that the date is November 13th and that the registration price jumps up at the end of July so I'll be officially signing up after the next pay day :) After surfing their site and reading about the course and looking at hotels in the area I decided to begin working on a training plan. I got out the calender and as I began to count backwards I realized that we are only 20 weeks out from the race! Ack! That snuck up on me. I haven't been running as much as I should and I've been slacking in the healthy eating department. After googling some different training programs I've put together the following schedule that I'm going to try and stick with for the next 20 weeks. You can see that I have tried to take into account the weeks when we will be moving and on the road and I'll be unable to run. I'll be cross training those weeks by lifting heavy boxes and walking back and forth to the moving van.

Week	S	M	T	W	TH	F	S	Special notes for the week
June 26-2							6
July 3-9	Rest	5	4	3	Rest	4	7	Travel to Portland
July 10-16	Rest	5	4	4	Rest	4	8
July 17-23	Rest	5	5	3	Rest	4	9
July 24-30	Rest				Rest			Moving to Abilene
July 31-6	Rest				Rest	4	10	Finish the move
Aug 7-13	Rest	4	5	3	Rest	4	10
Aug 14-20	Rest	4	5	4	Rest	4	11
Aug 21-27	Rest	5	6	3	Rest	4	12
Aug 28-3	Rest	4	6	4	Rest	4	13
Sept 4-10	Rest	5	7	4	Rest	4	14
Sept 11-17	Rest	5	7	5	Rest	4	15
Sept 18-24	Rest	4	8	4	Rest	4	17
Sept 25-1	Rest	4	8	5	Rest	4	18
Oct 2-8	Rest	5	5	4	Rest	4	20
Oct 9-15	Rest	4	8	5	Rest	4	22
Oct 16-22	Rest	4	5	4	Rest	4	12
Oct 23-29	Rest	3	8	5	Rest	4	10
Oct 30-5	Rest	5	6	4	Rest	4	5
Nov 6-12	Rest	Rest	5	Rest	3 mi	Rest	Rest
Nov 13-19	26.2

It's an ambitious schedule with my longest pre-race run at 22 miles.

During all of my research today I also saw that the new exercise center at ACU opens at the beginning of September and has an indoor track where I can potentially do some training so I'm not limited to super early runs when it's hot out. Unfortunately this does leave me with several months of training during the dog days of summer but I'm more excited than scared about the race!