'Nuther Newton Update and Boston

I am pretty excited.  Today in the mail I received confirmation of my Boston marathon entry.  It'll be the 114th running on April 19, 2010.  This means that this winter, I will focus mainly on running.  My secondary goal will be building bike power through shorter interval workouts, and swimming will take a bit of a back seat until spring.

By the time I write this, I've been running in the Newtons for the better part of 5 weeks.  I have allowed my workload to climb up to the ~6 hour/week mark.  No planning in particular yet, except for the general goal that by mid-December I want to be comfortably running 35-40 mi/week consistently and having a couple spins.  This will set me up for a marathon buildup of about 16 weeks.

Lengthening my runs by about a mile at a time, I can now consistently run an hour in the Newtons without feeling muscular fatigue.  I am no longer feeling pain in the soleus, and I have extended my long run up to about 11 miles in them.  I've put almost 100 miles in them total. The pace of my running has been unexceptional - certainly I would not attribute any particular pace to the Newtons (other than it's still hard to run VERY slowly in them).  The stride feels quite natural now.

Despite this progress, it seems that I am something of a slow adapter.  There is no doubt in my mind that there are simply different muscles involved here and that I need to strengthen them.  I am still sometimes getting some dull aches in my upper hamstrings the day after a longer run.  It's not enough to be a problem, but enough that I notice when I'm sitting.

Another thing I really notice is that it makes a much bigger difference to me whether I stretch properly.  For now, I believe that this simply has to do with the same need for strengthening that I feel otherwise. I called the folks at Newton, taking them up on their offer to chat, and I spoke to someone who seemed quite knowledgeable and reasonable.  Except that she hadn't dealt with too many people with dull hamstring aches.  Oh well.

At the very least, this has been a very interesting project/experiment to watch myself go through.  I think it's going to turn out well.