Marathon Training or Marathon Train Wreck??

As most of my loyal readers know, I'm planning my first marathon in October - the Chicago Marathon to be exact. I have a cool little countdown timer on the bottom of my blog that sometimes doesn't work to constantly remind me of how close it's getting!!

I started out using a training plan from Hal Higdon, the same guy who got me through my first half-marathon. It includes three runs during the week and a "long" run on the weekend that increases incrementally from 6 to 20 miles. So far, I've been able to make my long runs on the weekend, but the weekday runs have been killing me! My biggest problem is a constantly flip-flopping schedule from days to nights. When I'm on days, it's practically dark when I get home at 8 p.m. and as for mornings??? Do you honestly think I'm going to get up at 4:30 a.m. to run before I go to work????? And when I'm on nights, I have the issue of my "morning" being around 4 p.m. which is traditionally the hottest time of day which leads to ridiculously slow and frustrating runs. Basically for the first four weeks I was constantly missing my runs for one reason or another and feeling terribly guilty about it.

Once I decided to straighten up and get to it, I realized that I was so far behind on my total weekly mileage that I was likely to aggravate my IT band or cause some other injury were I to suddenly start following the plan. As a result, I bagged Hal's plans (sorry Hal) and turned to my new running guru, John "The Penguin" Bingham and his Marathoning for Mortals plan. I'm actually going with a run/walk plan because let's face it, at this point I simply want to complete it in one piece before the course closes. This plan still has the all important long run on the weekend ,but during the week, it's two days of running for 40 - 45 minutes (totally doable) and a day of cross-training (hello, remember when I *used* to want to be a triathlete??). So we're currently on week 7 and I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Tomorrow is a 9 miler and I'm still

chugging along.

Reporting from the path to marathon completion ...