First day of marathon training!

Even though I have been training, today was the first day of my 18 week training plan for the Chicago Marathon. I got a book a while ago called Advanced Marathoning and I decided to try out one of the plans listed in the book. The plan I chose is the 55-70 miles/week plan and I think it should be pretty easy for me to follow. I really want to improve my marathon time by a lot and I want to finish strong in this next one, so I thought it would be a good idea to use a training plan.

Today's workout consisted of a 9 mile run with a 4 mile tempo run included in that. I wanted to do this workout outside since I hate running on the treadmill, but it rained all day today, so I was forced to go into our hot and humid basement to do my workout. Luckily, there is a TV down there, so I watched Gilmore Girls while I ran. For the workout, I decided to start with an easy mile at an 8 minute pace. That went pretty well, so once I hit 1 mile, I turned the speed to 8.6 mph (about 7:00 miles) and ran 4 miles. It was tough to get through those 4 miles, but I made it, and then I turned the speed down to an 8:00 mile pace for a mile to recover. After I was recovered a little bit, I decided to do the last 3 miles of my workout at a 7:30 pace. I was pretty tired at the end, but overall the workout was a success.

I did find that at the end of my workout, my ankle was pretty stiff and sore. I've been having a lot of problems with my posterior tibial tendon since I ran the Wisconsin Half Marathon on May 1st. It's pretty swollen on the medial side of my foot and I have a lot of pain after running and if I'm on my feet a lot. I know I should probably rest it, but it's hard to decide to do that because I don't want to lose my running fitness and I don't have too much pain when I'm actually running. I'm still trying to decide whether I should see a doctor about it or not.