Choosing Marathon Pace

Well, it's close enough to marathon day I had better have an idea of how I want to run this. So I decided on 5:35 pace, provided it feels okay during the race. How did I choose that?

My best workouts like the 21k, 1k medium, 1k hard, workout the hard parts I averaged under 5:30. Plus I've run a number of those kind of miles in workouts and races in the last four months. Considering how many 5:30 and below miles I have run, I consider that my best case scenario pace. In other words, if everything goes really well, I might run a 2:24.

A bulk of my workouts have happened around 5:45 pace, and that's the pace of my last marathon in 2011. Considering I have had a few workouts better than that go around, I am quite confident that I will PR at Chicago, however, there are always variable that make running harder. Still, even if things go poorly I see myself running 2:30

Finally, on my best long run in this cycle, I finished off with alternating 5:35 and 5:50 miles. They didn't feel easy, but they didn't feel terribly hard either. Considering it is in the range of likely paces for me to run, it is as good as anything. However, it's not slow and if I'm not feeling it in the first few miles, I have to back off. Regardless of the pace I end up averaging, I will cross that finish line exhausted.

So I'm aiming to run 5:35 per mile for a marathon, for a total time of 2:26. If things go better than expected I would like to run even faster. However, if things go poorly I still have a cushion where I can run 2:2X.

The truth is, we don't know how I will run Sunday. If I knew what I would run, I wouldn't run it, and chances are I would be disappointed I wasn't 15 seconds faster or something.

I Live in Iowa: Week 126

It was a long week. The kind of week I arrive at home at night tired and exhausted. In fact, I don't really want to talk about it. Strange thing to blog I suppose.

Work, well there is a little stress there for two reasons. One is I turned down overtime several times lately to do everything else I do in life, and given the amount of money that is leaving on the table, I have to question that decision. The other reason I will tell you about next week.

Running, I started an abrupt taper running only 55 miles, after ten consecutive weeks between 80 and 106 miles. I had one 4.5 mile progression run in there and a medium long run. This is the hard part in the taper, resting, not working hard. Inevitably I always feel sluggish as though I am getting out of shape. It is important to remember feelings are not fact.

Coaching, I wasn't around as much as I would have liked. We had a meet, a number of people ran strong races, and a few ran not so strong races.

A note on my social life, I spent about four hours this weekend socializing with family and friends. I'm not sure what that sounds like, but it's way more than average for me. Doing all the above activities I realized this past weekend that I haven't been on a date in a year and more significantly, I can't think of one person in Dubuque that I know as a friend except through a job, running and bicycling, or my church. Two and a half years and someone could be living a nearly parallel life to me and I wouldn't know it.

I also had the chance Sunday night to see the movie Gravity. It's good. I'll post a formal review eventually.

In summary, taken way out of context, 1st Corinthians 15:36a, "How foolish!" It's a good way to describe those things in my life that stress me out. In short, so many things I assign value to, have no real value.

Over-Living Again

I did it again, too much of everything. The last week hasn't been pretty. I've missed at least four meeting split between three organizations. No time, and too much tact, for specific details now. Suffice to say, it's too much. When it rains it pours. 

In two weeks this bustle will be a memory. In a month I will be as bored as ever. At the moment, I have multiple recent failures and some big things to finish. 

Part of it is the marathon, spending months preparing for one day. I know my preparation was excellent, I am ready to go. It is harder to rest than it is to train hard. In fact, hard training is the easy part: destroy myself, recover, repeat.

Don't Think About It

This is one of the reasons I never excelled at baseball. A coach told me multiple times not to think about the ball, just hit it. Don't over think it, just do it. That just doesn't make sense, of course I'm going to think about the ball!

On the other hand, I'm running a marathon in nine days. The fastest marathon I ever have run. The more I think about it the more nervous it makes me. Okay, I had some of the best workouts I have ever had, plus a cross country 8k PR going into this race, now we're not going to talk about it much. That way I can be more relaxed and less nervous, and hopefully enjoy the experience a little more. (I will blog more about the race leading up to it, but other than 15 minutes a day blogging about it, the point is I try not to think about it.)

The larger picture is, "who of you by worrying can add one single hour to your life?" There are many things you don't control, far more than you control, if you even control anything, so why spend effort focusing on those things outside of your control?

That baseball coach might not have been great at instructing me to hit the ball, but he did have a point. If thinking about variable X drives you crazy because you have no control over it, then don't think about it. If it happens, it happens.

Work Harder

You want to hear the secret to running the world record marathon? Run twice a day every day and lift weights and focus on flexibility when others are resting in the two months after a marathon.

It's just so easy to talk about running because it is so simple, but the concept applies to your career, your relationships and other activities. You don't have to be the best, or work the hardest, but if you try the results will stand for themselves.

The Long Process

I have 11 days until my marathon, yet I have been training for marathons in one way or another for the last four years. I have three years work experience and a couple of engineering degrees. Kind of a dichotomy, on the one hand this physical effort I have worked hard for, while I am not nearing the end, I think we can say I'm past half way on the absolute best performance timeline. On the other hand, in engineering, three years and two degrees is hardly past halfway and I have not really come close to finishing my engineering goals.

For those of you that aren't goal orientated, I don't know what to say. For those that are goal orientated, I hope you understand the concept of building a ladder of goals that ends someplace amazing. For example, qualifying for the Olympic marathon trials would be great, but it's not going to happen for me in Chicago this year. I can't really imagine running faster than 2:23:00 this time. So this marathon kind of becomes one more rung on the ladder. Go out, work hard, run within myself, PR by several minutes.

A long process can also be though of as cooking. Maybe you start with a steak, and to make it the best you can you throw in onions and mushrooms, then some salt and pepper, a tiny bit of paprika, then a little butter just before the end. What starts out as a simple prospect requires numerous ancillary aspects or processes. If you want to run well, read about great coaching and fast athletes, in dozens of books and hundreds of articles. Each book is like a spice, each book is a little ancillary process that contributes to the overall development.

Cooking, running, engineering, relationship building, these are all similar. To have success at a long process involves many variables, a large amount of experience. Whatever you do, if it was easy everyone would do it.

The US Government is Shutdown

Okay, not a real surprise I suppose, but still disheartening. Why did this happen? About 80% of the time the government spends more than it makes in tax revenue. This means it needs credit, bonds, to keep operating, although it can just print money if it would like, but that's a different story. Time for a one trillion dollar coin! Think of this as needing another student loan to go to college another semester, a car loan or a home mortgage. The reason the government spends more than it makes, especially in this economy, is that it wants to grow the economy, and the more money people make, the more they spend. However, House of Representative Republicans are tired of the spending and feel that the Affordable Car Act, which already passed both houses of Congress, was signed by the president and upheld by the Supreme Court, might be just too much government spending. So they tried to delay the law from being implemented by not allowing the debt ceiling to be raised. Interesting to note the debt ceiling nearly tripled in the 1980s.

So today all non-essential government workers, are not working. The rest are working, without pay. Obviously the situation will change daily and even hourly, the real concern is if the US defaults on it's debt obligations, expected October 17th.