Ah, the Beginning

Welcome, one and all, to my training diary for the 2009 Los Angeles Marathon, which will also happen to be my first marathon! Thanks so much for stopping by. Let me explain a bit about myself and what I'm hoping for out of this whole diary thang.

I'm a 24 year old male, 180 pounds, six feet tall, and have an awesome job at Santa Monica College in Los Angeles as a note taker and test proctor for disabled students. I have a strong running background; I was the captain of my high school cross country team, and developed my passion for running and fitness as a result. I absolutely love racing, yet have never done a race beyond a 5-K, which for those of you not familiar with racing parlance, is a hair over 3 miles. The longest run I have done at once was 10 miles. Since my high school days, I moved to New York, have been a personal trainer and actually gravitated towards powerlifting for a number of years out there, but have returned to Los Angeles and have at long last come back to running.

I have always wanted to run a marathon, and actually trained for the New York Marathon several years back only to be rejected at the last minute in the random lottery. Since moving back to Los Angeles, I have been slowly easing myself into training for the marathon, which will start in earnest on Monday, October 13th, exactly 18 weeks before the marathon.

I have been following Hal Higdon's Novice Spring Training plan, available on his website, with stunning results. Since being on that plan, without doing any kind of speed drills or even anything other than running and minor stretching, I have become the fastest I've ever been. I can now, sprinting, run a five and a half minute mile, and can finish a 5-K pretty consistently at around 21 minutes. I've had such great success on his plan that I'm going to follow his Novice Plan for the Marathon to the letter.

This diary will basically be a daily log of what I do to prepare for the marathon. I'll post the distance I go each day, along with comments about each run. I'll also be posting my food intake starting around week 7, which will be when I start doing ten mile runs. I just took a body composition test, and found out that my body burns 3100 calories over the course of a normal day! Now that's a scary fast metabolism. Yes, you can all hate me now. I'll likely be trying to eat around 4,000 calories a day when I start my food intake. :)

Thank you all again for reading this journal and for your support. I've never done anything like this before, and while I'm obviously doing this for myself so I can chart my progress, I'd love to have this be an inspiration to others. The marathon is an amazingly long and right now daunting distance, but I'm excited, motivated, and confident. Let's do this!