Marathon Choices

Alrighty then -- as mentioned in the previous post, there will be a marathon in my spring.   I do believe the choices have been narrowed to two:  Avenue of the Giants on May 6th or The Eugene Marathon on April 29th.  

I'll outline a few pros and cons of each -- and then opinions are always welcome.  

Avenue of the Giants:

Pros:

1. Beautiful.  Like spectacularly beautiful not just run of the mill beautiful.

2. Closer (of the two) to home

3. Small!!!  (like teeny tiny)

4.  Will probably be able to convince several of my running girlfriends to run the half and then spectate until I come crawling in.  

Cons:

1. About a 200ft incline and a bit harder of a course

2. Small?? (I think that is a pro but it could be considered a con)

Eugene Marathon:

Pros:

1.  Well, this is supposed to be beautiful too but a different kind of beautiful.  more like pretty.  

2.  Smallish -- not teeny tiny like Avenue but with 8000 participants it is unlikely to freak me out either.

3.  Might get one girlfriend to come do the half and spectate me in.  

4.  More crowd support (maybe?  and this is something I don't seem to need so neutral really)

5. The course looks a bit easier:

Well, darn it -- you have to go here to see the elevation.  

Basically Eugene has a 150ft climb for 2 miles (from miles 1.5 to 4.5) -- then lots of downhill and a bit uphill from miles 21.5 on.  And by bit of an uphill, the elevation shows it to be 25ft so that isn't much at all.  

Contrast that with a 200ft elevation gain for 6.5 miles and then a lot of downhills.  But if you that map were expanded it would show a bunch of rollers, I think.  Hard to say.  

Cons:

1.  Farther away --

2. Bigger (which is both pro and con - ha ha ha -- I've used size as both a pro and con in both marathons)

Honestly I think either would be good first marathons -- neither is a super difficult course.  Both are fairly easy to get to.  Neither is a huge marathon (which would kill me as a first one, I know it).  I'm just finding it hard to commit.  

Comments?  Thoughts?  Opinions?  

Mileage and Marathons

Daily Mile says I ran 31 miles this week.  Being the low mileage girl I have been, this is a new record and other than sore quads (hills, or rather one big hill, yesterday) I'm good.

So I've just completed week 4 of 'lets just build miles.'  When I was reviewing all my training for the halfs that I've run, I noticed that I was just a low mileage girl, plain and simple.  I thought I'd run more this summer than last and I had - but not appreciably.  And I've proven that I can run a slightly sub 2 hr half with about 22 avg miles per week running.  I've done it, very consistently, 4 times.  My slowest half was Santa Cruz last April which I ran in 2.02.58 and my average weekly miles for that training cycle was well under 20 per week.   Each of the other halfs were:  1.59.02 (SJRNR2010), 1.58.33 (Disneyland), 1.59.11 (SJRNR2011) and 1.59.02 (Wine Country) -- (I'm consistent enough you could practically bet on me) all these were run with 20 to 24 miles per week average for 12 weeks leading up to the half.

Anyway, after going over all this in early October and really taking a look at what I want to get out of all this running business, I realize it is time for me to step it up a bit -- for two reasons.  First, I do want a 1.50 half.  Actually I want a 1.45 half but right now I'd settle for a 1.50.  Based on the above, I think I need more miles on my legs for that.  Second, I do plan on running a spring marathon (wow, that's the most definitive I've been about it yet!).  Clearly I'm not at marathon level training.  Not at all !

Which brings us to Tricia's Marathon Training, in two parts:

Part 1 -- from early Oct to Christmas time is miles building.  I'm strapping on the garmin so I can have the data but I'm not focusing on time at all.  Just running by what feels good for the amount of miles I'm running that day.  The past 4 weeks I've done 25, 28, 28, 31 miles respectively.  I'm going to hang out here at 31 for probably two weeks to acclimate a bit because hills have been added back in as of this week as well as miles.  My goal is to be at or close to 40 miles per week by Christmas.  I'm pretty sure this is doable -- and not too crazy of a plan.

Part 2 -- this part isn't finalized yet.  But part two will consist of an actual training plan and I should have 16 to 18 weeks-ish depending on which marathon is selected.  I'm reading all kinds of things now and at some point, will commit to a plan and make it mine and be ready to go for it come first week in January.  Oh yeah, and commit to a particular race.

It seems to me (and I'm always willing to hear opinions! I value them greatly) that starting a marathon training with 35 to 40 base miles per week is a good place for me to start.  I could never do a couch to marathon plan as I just require too much ramp up time to let my stamina catch up to what I'm doing (like yesterday -- it was only a 7.5 mile run but had a nice big 4 mile 900ft climb that just wore me out to the point I napped and did nothing the rest of the day!  Wimpy runner, much?  I really need to change the title of this thing).

Anyway, I'm loving this base building stuff -- it is just fun.  The runs are all good and I've got some built in flexibility on how I'm doing it so if I need to switch things up, I can.  I've found that the world is a wonderful place at 5.30 am in the dark and I've also found that the cold isn't killing me (yeah, and I get my cold is the rest of the country's balmy but still -- I'm cold).  The rain, of course, will make me melt.  I'm sure of it.  But I'll get the gym membership to handle that.

So TMT, part 1, week 5 -- Bring it on.

Three Things Thursday

1.  Burrrr -- it was a bit chilly this morning.  I think fall has finally come to the Bay Area.  Well, our version of it anyway.  First opportunity to wimp out of a morning run because of cold and I didn't (wimp out that is!).  Go me.  Of course now I have the added stress of trying to figure out what to wear -- seems I never did quite get it down last winter so am starting over.  Because I'm a nerd, I've started a spreadsheet of run date, temp, time of run, what I wore, what I wish I wore.  We'll see how that works.  This morning though I did finally figure out what a vest might be useful for.

2.  I'm loving the 5:30 am run -- even in the very dark and even in the cold.  Yesterday I ran at 9am in the morning and it totally stressed me out.  So many people around -- I had to stop at the stop lights -- crazy.    On the early morning runs there are more signs of life starting about 6 -- but from 5.30 to 6 it is really quiet still with only the occasional car.  I'm loving the peacefulness.

3.  So far, the no pressure running just to build a bigger base is working out well.  I'm mostly loving every run.  More on that later.  

P.S.

Jeeze, it is never good to write a post over several days -- I forgot the best part.  This is what we got at the end of the race:

Coolest medal ever -- it is a wine bottle stopper.  And then they gave you that glass -- I tried to get the picture to show the logo but it didn't come out very well.  Anyway, at the end of the race they had about 25 wineries representing and pouring -- and they even had some beer.  The food was actually fancier than your usual end of race pickings -- it was rice, beans and chicken and tortilla chips and salsa.  It was the longest I've ever stayed at the after party of a race -- and we had a ton of fun.

So there you have it!  Come run this race with me next year!!

Healdsburg Half ... more on the actual race

I've got to start this so I can finish it -- but what a crazy week it has been. (Didn't get this done on Friday like I hoped and now it is Sunday -- but here goes)

Alrighty then, this is my official account of what I did last Sunday (a week ago now).  But first off, a few opening thoughts on this race over all:  I LOVED IT.  Of the five half marathon's I've done this was hands down far and away my favorite.

1.  It was a small race -- 1065 for the half and 211 for the full.  I'm really finding that I love the smaller races.
2.  Beautiful -- it is hard to go wrong in wine country.  However, we did have to head back on a larger road -- but it wasn't bad.
3. The rolling hills were actually a bit fun.  Nothing was horrible or too fast so it just made it interesting.
4.  Wine and Beer at the end, along with rice, beans and chicken and totilla chips.

There was a group of eight of us coming up from SouthBay (for any non Bay Area folks, San Jose is considered South Bay and is about two hours south of wine country -- which is north of San Francisco. If I was really clever, I'd insert a map. I did just try to be clever and can't so it so here's a link to the map if anyone really cares).  Another woman and I were on the late shift and on our own so we went straight to the bib pick up and (very) mini expo.  Which happened to be at Kendall Jackson Winery (in my next life, I'll make sure I do better with the picture taking).  The winery was beautiful but we didn't do any tasting -- just grabbed our bibs and gender specific tech shirt (oh happy dance for gender specific shirts!  This one is nice and it FITS!) and cruised the (very) mini expo.  Not much there at all but that was fine -- we were headed out to the Healdsburg Bar and Grill to meet up with our friends and get our mid afternoon greasy food fix on.

Then we were off to the house we had rented -- and let me go on a bit about a great way to stay somewhere out of town for a race.  The backyard was beautiful.

It even had its own vineyard:

So we managed to spend some time just sitting and enjoying.  Some of the girls had a bit of wine but I just couldn't -- my stomach is so sensitive these days so I opted out (the night before that is -- I took well advantage the next day!).

After we enjoyed the backyard we moved into do cook the spaghetti dinner - and all of us were off to bed at a fairly early time.  I'm so not used to sleeping communally, I had a bit of a rough time so went to a couch and managed to catch a few hours.  5am comes very quickly no matter what but let me tell you that 8 women and three bathrooms works!  We all did just fine and were ready to head to the starting line (which was only about 2 miles away) by about 6:20 for our 7:00 am start.

The race starts right on time and uneventfully.  The first two miles were nothing super exciting.  We had to get out of the town and onto the back roads. As I mentioned in my previous post, the only thing I wanted to do was to negative split and finish strong.  But I wasn't sure what that looked like -- part of our group had driven the course the previous day and came back with tales of rolling hills and difficult course.  I hadn't seen it and there was no elevation map so I started off the race with goals that I didn't quite have an solid plan for executing.  I know that for a flat half, I should have started in low 9's and then just go down from there -- so I thought I'd see if I could do something like that allowing for the ups/down.  And I figured fairly soon I'd have a feel for how bad it was going to be.

Well to my delight, it wasn't that bad at all and my plan basically worked.  The inclines kept me at a reasonable pace but they were manageable and thus I didn't have to gain too much speed on the downhills.  It was really just a bunch of fun.  The first four miles went by in record speed (not reality but in my mind).  I was constantly paying attention to pace and how I felt -- and the miles still flew by.   Long about mile 5.5 I realized I needed to take a moment to look around (when running hard for me I tend to concentrate on the road in front of me and seem to miss a lot around me!) and it was beautiful.  But was really cool was at that moment it was so quite -- since it was a small race, the group had spread a bit but there was still a steady stream of runners and there were no talking pairs and many had music going (I didn't) so the only sound was that kind of a rhythmic beat of breathing and feet hitting the pavement.  I was exactly 'in the moment' right then and that doesn't happen to me often!

I finally ate a gu at about 6.5 miles and around the 7 mile mark started chatting with this woman from Denver -- she was lovely and it was fun running with her but I lost her at about mile 8 water station.  So from mile 8 on, I just kept telling myself to hang in so mile 9 could be wonderful.  I wanted mile 9 to be wonderful because that is where I lost it in SJRNR and I was a bit worried still about the big hill at mile 10 I'd heard about.  I hit mile 9 feeling fantastic so when the 'hill' (it wasn't much different that what we'd been doing) started at mile 9.5 I was feeling fantastic and decided to kick it in -- and started passing people going up hill (!!!!! which is always a fantastic feeling).  In hindsite I probably could have stepped it up a bit sooner but give the circumstances I think it went very well.  From 9.5 on -- I booked it as fast as I could on the downhill and pushed on the uphills.  Was only passed by one woman (probably in her 30's) and three guys in their 20's -- so all was good.  As I came into the finishers shoot I heard my name announced which actually almost made me stop -- it was unexpected so I thought someone was calling me.  DUH!

Anyway, I loved this race and I how I raced it.  It was kind of a 'A HA' race for me where a bunch of things clicked in my head.

I'm having trouble stealing pics from brightroom -- so I'll work on it and post them later -- there is one of the two sneaky guys at the finish -- funny really.

Anyway -- this race is definitely one I will do again.  And I encourage any locals to put in on their lists -- especially if you like non urban races.

And now on to the Big M -- plans to follow.