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RE: Long March Rocket
The call of the wild marathon.
I had a most interesting run this morning. Despite the effusive optimism of my previous diary entry, my focus today definitely wasn't on athletics, with much to do and places to be. My run was scheduled of course and so I got into it, but without any plan other than to cover the requisite 12km, slowly if need be, but with no other strategy in mind at all. Not feeling too bad once under way though I had a mind to turn it into a bit of a tempo run, building the pace slowly and ultimately covering the 12km in good time and feeling absolutely fantastic, with the last kilometre being covered in something akin to half mara PB pace.
Now that last statement really got me thinking. Half mara PB pace ought not be that difficult on a 12km training run, but of course training pace is a very different animal to race pace, so this for me was a great effort, certainly at this stage of my training. Extrapolating it further, I realised that aiming for a marathon PB later in the year isn't really out of reach. My half marathon PB of 1h54m suggests I should be able to run a full marathon distance in something closer to 4 hours, rather than the 4h41m which is my current PB. Now I'm nowhere near ready to run another 1h54m half marathon, but even if I could run say, 2h08m, I should have a reasonable chance of lowering my mara PB to under 4h30m, which is a more realistic goal for a marathon in the second half of this year.
Of course, that pre-supposes that everything goes well and that I complete a sufficient number of 30+ kilometre long runs and actually stick with the schedule. And as I know only too well, there are countless speed bumps and curve balls that get in the way of even the best-intentioned training plan. But it's a good starting point on which to base a serious marathon assault.
Let's run with that then. Yeah.
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Long March Rocket
