Well its now one day until the Auckland Marathon, the weather looks lousily (strong North westerlies and rain easing to showers! Yippee!). So I thought it would be worthwhile, more as a record to look back on than anything else, to put down my thoughts about tomorrows little adventure.
Tomorrow will be my third marathon (forth if you count the Ironman marathon), and so far they have each been learning experiences. I haven't yet finished a marathon satisfied with my effort or the result. At last years Auckland marathon I finished in 4 hours 2 minutes, which was a little disappointing, mind you I did treat it more as a long training run than as a "A" race and trained right up into it. This year, technically, should be quicker.
I'm currently on track to run somewhere around 3 hours 30 minutes. Does that mean I'll actually go that quick? I have my doubts...
My buildup to this marathon hasn't been as smooth as I'd like. I've gotten (very) sick which whipped 2 weeks of training completely and saw me come back with a lot of my prior conditioning lost. More recently I picked up a minor injury which prevented training for a week and raised a bit of doubt in my mind. That injury seems to be now largely resolved and I've been running freely of late.
All of this has meant that while my pace is still where it needs to be, I haven't been able to really test myself of some truly good long runs, so I have a grain of doubt in the back of my mind. If I run at my goal pace will I get to the 30k mark and start to crumble? Its happened before... Or should I ease back and simply aim to better last years time by two minutes?
I've been tossing these questions up over the last week and have largely decided on which route I'll take. I figure that if I go out conservatively and finish the race feeling quite good I'll be very disappointed in myself. So instead I'm going to back myself and go out at my goal pace, and if I crumble at least I'll do it spectacularly and will have something to write about tomorrow! On the other hand if I hold it together for the whole marathon the I'm going to be giving myself the opportunity to really knock a good chunk off my PB. And I think, for someone like me, that's a risk worth taking.
Watch this space, I'll update how things went tomorrow afternoon
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Brave decision. Good Luck!!! Don't leave it too long to post your result :)haha ... we (I) need to know how you get on :) What time did you do the Ironman marathon in??? (just out of interest)
Yes hmmm the Ironman marathon I "ran" and by run I mean suffled along a long way away from my happy place in a smoking 4hrs 53min 17sec. I'm reasonably confident I'll go faster than that tomorrow
Post a Comment