I ran a marathon! At the end of March, I started running to stay active while my gym was closed. It went better than I expected so I kept running and running. I set a goal of a 2 hour half-marathon. As I neared that goal, I got notions of training for a marathon despite the uncertainty of a marathon even happening. This race was a bit unusual. They have the course open for 2 weeks, I relied on Kelly to be my water stations, and we had to cross some active intersections. But I did it! I set a conservative goal of 8:30/mile pace and an aggressive goal of 8:00 pace. I came dang close to that at 8:05/mile and felt surprisingly good throughout the race. A big thank you to Kelly who not only was my personal aid station today, but spent many mornings solo parenting while I was out running (sometimes for 3 hours…)
After my marathon, I have now gone on 175 runs this year totaling 1285 miles and 200 hours. To train, I followed the 12 week 55-70 mile plan from Advanced Marathoning by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas. Before that I was following base training plans from Faster Road Racing by Pftizinger and Philip Latter. The marathon training plan was quite time-consuming. I felt pretty sick of running the final few weeks leading up to the race. However I think it put me in a great position to exceed my expectations. While I set a goal pace of 8:00/mile, that only entered my mind on my final tune-up run on the Tuesday of race week. My initial goal at the start of training was four hours or 9:09/mile.
I spent some time yesterday analyzing my race data. I ran miles 6-20 all below my average pace. Before that, I was mainly warming up and getting down to race pace. After that, I was struggling to stay as close to race pace as possible. I was able to push myself at the very end and ran mile 26 at 7:53, twelve seconds faster than my overall pace.
A handful of people have already asked me if I want to do another marathon. There was a stretch during the race (I’d say miles 18-24) where I thought “ok I can check this off my bucket list, no way am I ever doing this again”. But I’m actually leaning towards doing more marathons right now. My training plan includes a five week recovery plan which will basically take me through the end of 2020. At that point I’ll actually have to decide if I want to start training for another marathon. Right now I’m considering attempting to qualify for the Chicago marathon, which would require a time of 3 hours and 10 minutes. A 22 minute improvement sounds difficult but plausible to me.