99 Days of a Training is a 99-part series that I will document my daily progress towards my first marathon. Each day I plan on recognizing a word or phrase that corresponds with that day’™s training. This series will conclude on May 6th, 2012 when I toe the start line (or somewhere in the back of the pack) at the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati, OH.

So far so good for this week.  I’m scheduled to do 43, of which 19 was scheduled between Monday and Wednesday, and I’ve actually done it for the first time in ages.  I’m at 19.04 now.  As I’ve already detailed I put forth a blazing 5 miles on Monday, a steady 4 miles on Tuesday, and tonight I topped it off with 10 grueling miles.

I’ve also mentioned throughout the previous posts how much I love this track out here.   I’m on the road this week and there is a great place to run, which helps.  But, it is only about 0.62mi in length.  If you do the math it is right around 16 laps to do 10 miles.  It doesn’t matter where I am, 16 laps is very monotonous and I believe that really played in tonight.

I won’t lie, I struggled a bit.  My pace wasn’t that bad (10:24), but I just wasn’t mentally there for this one.  I firmly believe distance running is much, much more mental than physical, and I didn’t have it tonight.  When you know you have to do 16 laps around the trail, and that each lap will take you 6-6:45 minutes, it doesn’t put you in the right mindset to start.  I probably should have mixed some street running in to break it up, but I wanted an apples-to-apples comparison of miles for comparison.

I definitely did not come close to even splits tonight. I started out too fast, though I felt as if I was going slow (but when it was also the same course that I threw down 5 miles @ 8:26, anything will seem slow).  My first mile was 9:36.. way too fast for me.  I tried to slow it down some more, only made it to 9:51.  This would come back later as I was no longer trying to slow down, rather speed up.  By mile 8 I put down a 10:52. Not good if trying to achieve negative splits.   For more details see my RunKeeper info for tonight.

As for my diet today.. it was good, though a bit high.  I say high because I like to try to limit myself to around 2000 calories, which I know is stupid to do when running 10 miles.  According to my HRM I burned 1,654 calories during this run, add that to the 2,010 calories that MyFitnessPal says I need a day to hit my goal and in theory I should ingest 3,664 calories.  It looks like I’m ending the day with 2,298… but I feel stuffed.  For dinner I had St. Barts Citrus Chicken at Cheeseburger in Paradise, which comes with rice & broccoli.  By my guestimation that is only about 600 calories, but it is soooo good, and filling.  To bump it up I also had a cup of gumbo for an appetizer.  For lunch today I had a chicken salad sandwich on croissant along with a bowl of corn chowder soup (I love corn chowder!).  In there I also had a banana for a morning snack (and potassium) and a fruit cup for an afternoon snack.  Yogurt, mixed fruit, hardboiled egg and a bit of oatmeal for breakfast.   I am not sure why I didn’t start using MyFitnessPal earlier, as it totally rocks!

Okay, that is long enough for tonight… back up in the morning to do 4 more before a much needed rest day on Friday.