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.

Thinking About My Marathon

With 5 weeks to go before the 2013 Rehoboth Beach Seashore Marathon, I saw a tweet today posted by the Runner’s World editors that made me ponder my race strategy:

@runnersworld: Don't cling to a race goal you set 6 months ago. Instead, adjust them to match your fitness, your health, and the weather. #runningtips

Back in May, when I signed up for this race, my goal was to run it somewhere around 4 hours, 20 minutes, which would be a 10-minute improvement from my time at Marine Corps Marathon in 2012. But my current training, along with race results since signing up for the marathon, is making me reconsider that time goal.

First, I ran a 1:59:23 at the Alexandria Running Festival half-marathon on Memorial Day weekend. Plugging that time into the McMillan Running Calculator shows that I could reasonably expect to run a full marathon in 4:11:15 (9:35 pace). I ran a good race there, but missed a PR by 14 seconds.

Next, in the Anthem Great Pumpkin 5K on October 12th, I ran a PR of 25:03. Again, using McMillan, a reasonable marathon time extrapolates out to 4:04:05 (9:19 pace). I don’t see much use in using a 5K time to estimate a marathon time, especially one that would be almost a 30-minute improvement on last year. But still, I’ll take it into consideration in my valuation.

Last, I ran 1:28:15 at the Army Ten Miler 12 days ago, another PR. McMillan calculates a marathon time of 4:07:44 (9:27 pace) based off of that result. But even though I thought I ran a great race there, McMillan calculates that I should run a 25:25 in the 5K, which is 22 seconds slower than I ran a week prior. So I’m valuing that 5K estimation a little more now.

If I average those 3 estimations together, I come up with 4:07:04 as a reasonable marathon time, which is a 9:26 pace. I then averaged my last 6 double-digit long run paces, and came up with a 9:53 average. Again, working off McMillan and those 3 races, my long run paces should run between 9:22 and 10:33. The midpoint of those 2 numbers is a 9:58 long run pace, 5 seconds slower than the average of my last 6 runs.

Being the numbers geek that I am, I am very much inclined to adjust my goal time for the marathon to 4:08:00, a 9:28 pace. That would represent almost a 23-minute improvement on my marathon time. But with the relatively flat course in Rehoboth, and likelihood of cool weather on December 7th (although last year was mild & humid), I’m not terribly afraid of that goal. The key for me will be to log negative splits, and to start off slow and finish strong.

And even though I’m “retiring” from the marathon after this event, a 4:08 would make it very intriguing to try for a sub-4:00 sometime later.