Dallas Marathon Training: Week 1 Complete!

So I decided to bite the bullet and train for the 2012 Dallas Marathon (the race formerly known as the White Rock Marathon). Three other friends have signed up as well and we are doing the Dallas Run Club training program, so it's great to have a group to train with as well as people I already know in the group.

This past Tuesday, we had our orientation meeting where we learned what pace group we would be in and met our pace leaders. In order to determine our group, the DRC used past race times (which we submitted when we signed up online) plus the results from the DRC Independence Day 10K. The 10K was my slowest 10K to date because of the heat, so I was surprised to learn that they wanted to put me in the 4:00 pace group. That seems awfully ambitious to me! My friend Brandon finished the same race faster than I did and was placed in the 4:20 pace group. He thought that would be too slow so we decided to split the difference and both run with the 4:10 group.

Saturday morning, I met my running buddies Brandon and Laigha bright (well, dark) and early so we could carpool to White Rock Lake for our first training run with the group. Our friend Lauren met us there, she will also be training with the 4:10 group. For our first run, we did an easy 7 miles. Nelson, our pace leader, kept us at a comfortable 11:00min/mile pace. The pace leaders let us know that our long runs would be much slower than we are used to. The first 8 weeks of the program are base-building weeks.

The DRC has group runs on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The rest of the runs I will be completing on my own (or with some running buddies if that works out). There is another group, an offshoot of DRC, that meets Wednesday nights so if it works out that I can run with them some weeks I will.

So, after all that explanation, here is the plan for this week. The training schedule that the DRC gave us has times instead of miles (ex: 30 min instead of 3 miles) but I will note my planned mileage as well.

Sun 7/22: 30 min cross train (yoga)
Mon 7/23: 30 min recovery run (3 mi)
Tues 7/24: DRC training group, 50 min base/easy
Wed 7/25: 30 min recovery run (3 mi)
Thurs: 7/26: 50 min base/easy run (5 mi)
Fri 7/27: Rest
Sat 7/28: DRC training group, 8 mi long

That's more days running than I am used to, so we shall see!