After that suspension of marathon training, I lost a few days due to business and lack of motivation. It is much harder to get yourself out the door in the dark, or in bad weather, when you don't have a race to train for.

Then somehow I injured my right knee. I'm not sure if I kneeled or squatted the wrong way, but I woke up one morning, and my knee was hurting bad. I had to skip a few days, and that added to the low-motivation non-running days turned into a 10-day break.

So following Jack Daniels, I staged a careful comeback. My first full-load day was April 18, when I ran a 15-miler. It felt great.

Now I'm back on Daniel's Gold plan. It doesn't seem like I lost much fitness. I ran a 20-minute threshold run yesterday entirely by feel, and I ran a pretty consistent 6:30 pace. It didn't feel harder than a threshold run should. This was two days after I ran a 10 x 1/4 mile workout, which was also fine. (No treadmill running for a while though - we are under pandemic lockdown.)

Now I'm planning to run the Louisville Marathon in the fall. I used to think I cold possibly run 3 hours there, but that sounds hard, especially if there is an Epsilon Camp, in which case no real training can be expected for the second half of July. Let's just make no time goal plans right now. And let's hope the race will actually be held.

An 18-week plan would start on July 12 (Sunday), which is a good milestone anyway, because Epsilon Camp would start around then. So it is a sensible plan to do Daniels' Gold Plan until then. That gives me 12 weeks on that plan including the one I'm finishing now. So the schedule looks like this:

Phase I: April 20 - May 10
Phase II: May 11 - May 31
Phase III: June 1 - June 21
Phase IV: June 22 - July 12

For Phase I, the training plan is in my previous post. Not sure about all those strides though. I'll do them, if I feel like it, which probably means, mostly I won't do them. :)