A Change of Pace

A month has passed since I participated in the Olympic Games. Now it is time to decide what to do next! It has been announced that I will participate in the 2013 Boston Marathon in April 2013, but there is a lot of time between now and then.

Before I ran the marathon in London, I thought that I'd run the World Half Marathon Championship, and get back to some heavy mileage. I assumed I would be back at my usual 120 miles a week. But it seems as if my coach, body, and mind have other ideas. I've decided to take the fall to work on a skill that I neglected this summer: my speed.

I'll be cutting back a bit on my mileage workload in an effort to find a little pop in my marathon legs. The next few months will be focused on more turnover and less volume. I'm going to back off from my 120 miles a week to about 90. Instead of doing a double run six days a week, I'm only going to do a double run twice a week. I'll still get in a good deal of mileage and long runs, but my track sessions will be more focused on speed and I'll cut out some of the extra mileage I do on my recovery days.

This is the year of Innovation for Nissan, and this plan I have for the fall parallels the same theme. I'm trying to become the best athletic version of myself. I feel that getting some speed back this fall will carry over and make my marathon better when I start up heavy mileage again after the new year. It's always good to work on different skill sets, and my goal is to get a little more knee lift out of these shuffling marathon legs.

I'm still putting my fall schedule into place, but I'm hoping to do some fun races that are a little shorter in distance. I'm also eyeing a possible trip to Australia in December to knock out a 10,000-meter qualification for the World Track Championships next year.  The qualification is 31:45, and it would be great to get it out of the way now.


I'm excited to take this fall and do something different. It'll be a challenge to train like a track athlete again, but it will make me a better marathoner and keep me on my toes. (No pun intended). After the new year it's back to altitude and high mileage. Then I'll have some business to take care of come April in Boston.

What's your fall running goal? What are you training for?

--Kara Goucher, Record-breaking marathoner