Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Marathon Week

It's Tuesday, so that means it's only 4 days until my next (and final) marathon, the Rehoboth Beach Seashore Marathon in Delaware. I'm currently in taper mode, trying to ignore all of the phantom aches and pains that are mysteriously showing up this week.

This past Thursday, I ran the Inside Out Sports Turkey Trot 8K in Cary, NC. It was sunny and 21 degrees at the start, and for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of running in the Raleigh-Durham area, it's hilly. My goal going into this race was to A) stay injury-free, and B) try to hit a 42:30 time. Everything went swimmingly, and I escaped injury-free with a new PR of 42:08 (an 8:28 pace).

Now the focus is on Rehoboth, and constantly thinking about my race pace. In an earlier post, I determined that from past performances I could run about a 4:08 marathon. I ordered pace bands from Races to Remember, and since they only do paces on the zeros, 5's & 10's, I settled on the 4:10 band. But further study is showing that this may be conservative, or at least confusing to me.

Looking at the Jack Daniels Calculator, and entering recent race times, I found something rather startling. When I entered my Army Ten Miler time of 1:28:15, I came up with a projected marathon equivalent pace of 4:03:11, below my 4:10 goal. And while it doesn't show a projected 8K time, I can average the 5K and 10K equivalents and come up with roughly 8:24 for an 8K, which is very close to my 8K pace last week. So that seems surprisingly accurate.

OK, so I went back to the calculator and entered my 8K time of 42:08 - and got 4:04:14 as a marathon equivalent. So 2 races in the past month, and the difference in marathon equivalents for both is 63 seconds. Average the 2 together, and Mr. Daniels formula spits out a 4:03:42 equivalent marathon time.

Considering my training hasn't exactly been stalwart for this race, I'm really not sure if I have it in me to break off a 4:03 in the marathon. Heck, I'm still wary about trying for a 4:10. But I'm going to stick with the 4:10, with the caveat that if I feel good at 20 (and if I'm still on track for a 4:10), I may just ditch the pace band and go for that 4:03, or something close to it.

Time to focus now.

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