August running recap

My August running stats are fairly unimpressive for someone heavily into a marathon training period and building endurance. Overall I managed 178km in August with an also unimpressive 2169 m of elevation ran.  On face value a failed month of training that didn’t see me run enough kilometres to gain the value that I was hoping.

While not the monthly mileage I had planned the month had it’s challenges at the start of the month and I was able to come through and post some really valuable runs. Overall I missed 12 days of running at the end of July and beginning of August through having a flu. This meant I was only able to run on 13 days of August. One of the worst colds and flu’s I have had in my life and I was just unable to shake it off for quite some time. The first week of August saw no running at all followed by 37km in week 2 with most of this on the Sunday 13th August where I ran through a 19km long run on the beach. This was basically the start of my training in August, from here I new I needed to up the distance on my weekly long run each week more than I would normally to get enough running into the legs before a marathon.

I was able to run 29km and 36km long runs for the remaining two weeks of August and this morning ran 39km albeit on the first day of September so kind of exempt from this August recap. Each of the last three weeks i have been able to put out interval and hill repeats sessions as planned and continue to build my speed and strength.

When you have a good base of training from a number of years of running, fitness come backs fairly quick. The 12 days off running with the flu followed by a week of running while still having the flu have not affected my fitness too much and I have been able to come out the other side and be relatively comfortable with my overall fitness.

It’s now just over three weeks till my race and I feeling pretty good about my fitness and my endurance.  August hasn’t provided me with a perfect preparation but it has ended much better than it started and I am beginning to feel some confidence going into September and the last couple of weeks of training.