Since I am in Europe for a while, I was really anxious to start exploring the races around here. As I mentioned the other day, there are over 600 marathons in Europe! While I would like to do all of them 🙂 I know that is not going to happen! Instead, I thought I would try to highlight what I thought would be some of the cool, outside the mainstream events that I could run and review for all of you to consider should you take a swing at a European Marathon some time. There are many reviews and articles on the major marathons over here, so I am looking for the nuggets hidden away. This brings me to…
My Marathon Challenge
Due to the move and a bunch of other stuff that has kept me busy (work, family, etc), my running volume has been really down as of late. I mean, really down. Like I went almost two weeks without running because of my travel back to the US, more packing, and then returning to Europe. Because I am planning to do Dubai as a redemption race, my workout strategy looked like this:
- Mid-July – Mid-August – 3-5 mile runs a day followed by Insanity workout (to build my core and work on other muscle groups running exercises tend to not touch)
- Mid- August – September 12 – base building for my marathon program
- September 15 – start training for the Dubai Marathon
I was really very happy with myself and how disciplined I was going to be to plan this far ahead for a marathon (I normally take them as they come 🙂 I get too impatient in between races). However, since I am trying to do as much research and planning for you all as possible, I came up with a crazy idea!
My Marathon ChallengeÂ
It has been a long time since I ran a marathon on training miles that did not top 40 miles a week. In fact, I think the only marathon that I ever ran where I never went over 40 miles was my first one. The problem is that I really do not have the time for my possible next marathon to ramp up my mileage and I really want to work on my Insanity program as well. I have done some of the insanity workouts before while in the middle of marathon training and it is really hard to keep up the miles with the workouts at the same time. So, here is what my marathon challenge consists of:
- 40 days of training
- 40 miles (max) per week
- Sub 4:00 marathon
I normally would not have a problem going sub 4 hours but with my lack of running and minimal training plan, I am setting that as a goal.
Photo Taken from Reykjavik Marathon site
What marathon is this? I am tentatively planning on running the Reykjavik (Iceland) Marathon on August 24th. Visiting Iceland is on my bucket list of places to visit and what better way to see it than running a marathon there? 🙂 I have heard some great things about this race before so I would really like to review this marathon for my readers. It is a great location for East Coast runners since it is a mere 5 hours from NYC – in other words, it is about the same distance as it is to go to the West Coast! So it is not that too big of a trip!
Another part of the challenge is to try and get there for as little money outlay as possible, which will be difficult since there are limited options to get to Iceland. I already have my hotel secured (another post on this later) and am working on the flights now. It should be a great trip!
In the coming weeks, I will give more detail on my travel plans as well as weekly summaries of my training and how it is going.
Note: I am an experience marathoner with very few injuries over my running history. I do not suggest for new marathoners to use a schedule such as this for a marathon unless your body is adequately prepared for such an event.
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