Training is going well for the Umstead Marathon. So well that this post about it will probably be obnoxious, but I do have this blog thing and I really should write something. So here are the particulars, more or less:

Monday: Scribble Run.
Tuesday: interval run – either 400m hill repeats or 800m hill repeats. I’ve been gradually increasing the number of repeats, am now up to seven.
Wednesday: Scribble Run.
Thursday: progression tempo, gradually increasing time/distance/same thing, really. This run is divided into four paces, in this order: marathon pace, half marathon pace, 10K pace, marathon pace. Or fast, faster, fastest, fast.
Friday: REST
Saturday: Marathon pace run, distance increasing over time, now up to ten miles. Six miles every other week.
Sunday: Long run, easy pace, at least two hours, no more than three. Every other week from here on out the long run isn’t so long – twelve miles, still at Scribble pace.

*Sometimes things get a little switched around, of course.
*Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday runs also include a warmup and cooldown of at least a mile each.
*I’ve been adding runs in the afternoon, always easy and usually with my two faster dogs. We’ll run between two and four miles.
*The Monday and Wednesday Scribble Runs are usually run in the morning, just with the one dog who isn’t freaked out by roads (Sunny).
*Many afternoon Scribble Runs are on trails.
*If the long run is feeling very good, I’ll pick up the pace to a little slower-than-marathon effort for the last third.
*If the long run still feels good on the last mile, I add a little Secret Sauce. I’m awful at keeping secrets, so I’ll just tell you now that the sauce is fifteen-second all-out steep hill repeats. The most I’ve done so far is six.
*How’s this asterisk thing working for you? I kind of like it.
*My main mileage objective isn’t so much to hit a specific number, but rather to run more cumulative miles Monday through Thursday than I do on Saturday and Sunday. So if I’ve got a ten-mile pace run on Saturday with a warmup and cooldown and a twenty-miler on Sunday, my goal is to have at least thirty-two miles by the end of the day on Thursday.
*For core work, I’m doing planks. I find them tedious and difficult, which is why I’m doing them. As my corpus shakes pathetically and veins bulge out of my forehead, I think of the awful hill called Cedar Ridge at mile twenty three. So far I’m up to two-and-a-half minutes before collapsing.
*Last week week I ran seventy-one miles, and I expect to hit 70 again at least two more times.
*I’ve worn my new Garmin Forerunner 310 for every run, and have documented them all with commentary on DailyMile.

I run barefoot when I can, but there are two obstacles: being winter, it’s frequently uncomfortably cold and I’m a wuss that way, and the terrain where I’ve been doing a lot of my running is inhospitable and I’m a wuss that way too. I don’t keep track of these things, but thinking back to last week I know I ran about fourteen miles without shoes out of the seventy-one. The rest were in either Merrell Road, Flux, or trail gloves, or Sockiplasts.

And there you have it, a post. Voila! Oh wait – one last thing to make it official. I’ve gotta end with a question to solicit comments. So here it is: Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?