Today’s guest post comes from Evan! If you haven’t checked out his blog before you must do so immediately, if not sooner. But in between baking, cooking, and school he also finds time to run. His story today is different than some of the past marathons+moderation posts as his story includes overcoming injury. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did! Now, hop over to his site to start carbo loading!

Everyone has an ideal race in mind for their first marathon: The perfect training plan, the perfect pacing, the perfect time. I know I did until I learned the hard way that things never go perfect.

The week I started marathon training I got a stress fracture. By any accounts that should be the end of a marathon dream, but for me it wasn’t. I was determined: I had paid the entrance fee and I wasn’t losing it. It took my 6 weeks just to run 2 miles at a time, leaving me with 12 weeks until the race.

During those 12 weeks there was no moderation. I constantly broke the 10% rule of mileage increase week after week, pushing myself as far as I could go wearing knee and shin sleeves to prevent further injury. Runs during the week got shorter so that I could run farther on the weekend. My one 20 mile run went terrible because I didn’t plan my fueling, let alone the fact that I could barely run 20 miles in a week. Sheer determination and stupidity carried me to race day.

Somehow I finished my first marathon, and in 4 hours and 19 minutes no less. It was short of the 4 hour goal I had in mind, but felt like a victory after all I had been through. I swore I would never run another marathon again, and then 5 days later found myself signing up for one the day registration opened.

Learning From Mistakes

In November I’m running the Philadelphia marathon. This time around is going to be different: I’m going to plan. With 14 weeks to go, I’m running 30 mile weeks and feel comfortable running 13 miles on goal pace. The training plan I have set up involves not one but three 20 milers so that I can not only run that distance but run it comfortably.

Most of all, for the Philadelphia marathon I’m giving myself the gift of Time: time to build weekly mileage, time to increase speed, time to lengthen long runs, time to run long on the weekends, time to rest, and time to cross-train. All of those are important in building a good training plan. If you’re only giving a training plan 50% of your attention, squeezing it in when you can, you’re going to get 50% of your potential on race day.

If you’d like to read more you can check out my complete marathon recap and the 10 things my marathon taught me as well as my whole blog for vegetarian recipes to fuel your runs.