A Great Weekend

Hi Guys,

I know it's been far too long since my last post, but as the training becomes more intense and I still have my regular workload during the week unfortunately it seems as though the blog has been getting the short end of the stick. But here's a post now and I promise to be better in the coming weeks.

As February has just ended I guess it was fitting that on Saturday, February 28th I went for a Saturday morning long run with the Dana Farber group. For those of you new to the marathon training regime it is typical that once a week you include a long run in your training. The distance of the long run increases as the training goes on, ultimately culminating in a run of around 21 miles. For the Boston Marathon, it's widely known that three weeks prior to the marathon the 21 mile run occurs and typically involves runner's trekking out to Hopkinton (the start of the marathon course) and following the course to mile 21, which happens to be at the top of heartbreak hill. But as we're still 48+ days out, this run is still a few weeks away.

Instead, the group run was "only" 20 miles this weekend... I didn't know about this distance until Friday so I was a bit nervous at work about doing that much distance the following day. I went to the Celtics game that night which was great, had nachos which had repercussions, and got to bed by midnight. Woke up at 6:30 in the morning, thought to myself "this is earlier than I get up for work most of the time and here I am on Saturday up at this ungodly hour". I managed to get a ride out to the athletic club we were running out of and we hit the road after a few announcements at around 8:30. I am not the best runner when it comes to going out slow and not running a faster pace than I can maintain, so I tagged along with a group of people I know from Dana Farber. The first few miles felt ok although I started to wonder if Montezuma's revenge had caught up to me from the nachos the previous night. I also have had a cold all week and wasn't feeling all that well. Mentally after the first few miles I began to wonder how I was going to go 20 miles with all these excuses that I had lined up about why I shouldn't run well. And to boot we were running at a conservative pace.

Fast forward to mile 7 - we've now run a few more miles and my mind and muscles have both started to wake after an hour of running. I was still running with the group of Dana Farber folks but as we hit the first hill on route 16 I guess I was feeling really good and before I knew it I was on my own running. I was slightly nervous that I was going too fast and whether I could maintain the new pace for 13 miles, but it felt good and I often run what feels good, regardless of the pace. Anyway, I make it to the turnaround pount, 10 miles into the run in 84 minutes. For some reason I thought that the next 10 miles were going to be brutal, but they seemed to fly by. The next water stop was at the 14 mile mark and I was feeling great. Miles 14-17 were the hills of the marathon course, culminating with heartbreak hill (which I was not happy to see and decided to look at the pavement rather than the top of the hill since when you're running it you don't feel like you're getting any closer). Once at the top at mile 17 and the last water stop it was smooth sailing back to the athletic club having run the second 10 miles in 77 minutes (7:42 pace). Overall it was a time of 2:41 (161 minutes or about 8:03 pace).

I was really happy with my run even if a bit disappointed that perhaps I went out too slow given my running the second half seven minutes faster (called a negative split). The other good news to take away from the run was that I did in fact think I could have run the extra 6 miles come race day. Overall it was definitely an encouraging run and it gives me hope that in 48 days I might pull out a great time.

One last tidbit after that long drawn out story is that after adding up my mileage for February it seems that I racked up 181 miles (about 45 miles/week). And considering I took 8 days off means I ran an average of just about 9 miles a day. We'll see what March holds in store; 200 miles perhaps? More than anything I hope there are no injuries.


http://tinyurl.com/ctrye9 (I hope this links you to a google map of the route I ran on Saturday. I think sometimes it's difficult to visualize it until you see it on a map)