Track and Field Blogs - Magdalena Lewy-Boulet

I just returned form a week at Sea Ranch, California. It is a family tradition to go to Sea Ranch each year now with my family, my best friends to escape the city life, run the beautiful coastal trails, play with our dogs on the sandy beaches, cook delicious food and take good naps. This place is very peaceful, inspiring and very unique. It makes you want to run forever!

I began each morning with a 12-mile run and wanted to run more. Perhaps it is the coastal air or the fog sitting over the ocean or the views that makes you want to keep going. A huge reason why I train and race is because I can go to beautiful places to run.

I am 9 weeks out form the ING NY Marathon and training has been going really well. I would like to share weekly updates on my final preparations for the ING NY marathon. Since June I have raced the Mini 10k in NY, the Belin 10k in Green Bay, the USATF 10k, Bix 7mile, Crim 10 mile and I am off to race the 20k in New Haven on Labor day. This has been a lot of traveling to the east coast and mid west, so the trip to Sea Ranch brought some peace and solitude.

Last week I ran 130 miles and that included 2 quality workouts and the rest was easy mileage. The first workout consisted of 5k effort intervals and the second workout consisted of mile repeats at threshold followed by an hour run, followed by a couple more threshold repeats. This is one of my favorite workouts as you get so much out of this type of a workload. You spend 8-10 miles at a pace that is faster than marathon pace, you get the fatigue factor by doing long cool down after you have already run 8-10 miles at good pace then you get back to threshold pace for a couple more miles and before you know it you have done a 20mile workout, which also counts as your long run for the week. Pretty sweet! But most of all, this type of a workout prepares you well for a marathon. You learn to fight the fatigue and not quit as soon as the pain kicks in. You get a chance to practice fueling and I have been fueling on a combination of the vanilla-orange Roctane GU energy gel and the lemon lime GU Brew Electrolyte drink.

This week I am going into the race with good amount of mileage behind me, but am backing off on the volume slightly. It is always difficult to back off in the middle of marathon training, but at the same time I love to race and want to feel good in those races. So I strive for that balance where I can accomplish my goals by using the races as indicators of how my training is going and keeping the excitement and reward of racing alive with out cutting out too much volume and intensity in the early stages of my preparation.

I know that I have written before about treadmill training and I am excited to say that I got a new treadmill in my new to be gym/garage. I now own a used Woodway treadmill without the handrail….still working on assembling this great machine, but for now it gets the job done. Every other week I do an interval session on the treadmill. It is amazing how much of a difference a good treadmill makes in terms of quality of the workout and on leg muscle recovery. I like doing faster stuff on a treadmill because I workout on my own and it is not that much fun going to the track by myself to run 16x400 at 5k pace or 8x1k. So the treadmill keeps me honest, becomes my training partner and when I am done I can make my recovery drink immediately after the workout and not miss out on the recovery window. I have been really enjoying the GU Brew recovery drink, it is tasty and it helps me recover well especially from high intensity workouts.

I am off to CT tomorrow and really looking forward to racing the 20k in New Haven this weekend. Hopefully we get good weather. Stay tuned for more next week.

- Magdalena