Here I go again...

Okay so I signed up for the marathon on Sunday. It might be a foolish thing to have done, but I really wanted to take a shot at BQing in the spring. Yeah I know you've heard this from me before, but I'm writing this today in the type of fitness that I think I should have been in to run Napa but was derailed due to me getting sick about a month prior to that marathon.

Going to bed last night, I had pretty much decided that I wasn't going to do the full and rather would do the half. I was actually looking at the National Capital Marathon on May 25 as a possibility to try and still squeeze in another marathon in this spring. The weather forecast for this Sunday looked miserable. Rain and winds from the east of 30km/hr. The last quarter of the marathon is heading in an easterly direction so it would have meant a headwind for the last 10km or so. Not fun.

Anyhow this morning I was supposed to do 7 miles with 2 at marathon pace. But instead, I decided I would try and do the 7 miles with 2 at half marathon pace which I'm guessing was about 7min/miles. My main reason for doing this was to try and calibrate my foot pod at 7min/mile pace. I found it quite helpful for pacing at 8min/miles and thought it might be helfup for the half on Sunday. I jogged to the track and started into it trying to maintain a 1:45 lap, but what I found quite interesting was that my HR was not getting high at all and it felt really easy. I ended up doing 3.5 miles total rather than just 2 miles around the track cause I was trying to see if the HR would ever get higher. In total the HR touched 171 a couple of times, but averaged about 167-168 for most of these miles which averaged about 7:00min/mile. I did do one lap at my Boston pace near the end (between laps 11 and 12) and the HR average dropped to 166, but was actually closer to 164 right at the end of the lap. This had me somewhat encouraged since I've always used 170 as a general guide for my marathon pace HR. So this at least indicated that I might be in boston qualifying shape and had me rethinking whether i should do the marathon or not all day.

The only concern was still the crappy weather predicted for Sunday, but that seems to have cleared up for now. The weather forecast is now predicting only a 20% chance of rain and winds from the southeast of 10km/hr. Much better than the stuff they were predicitng last night. So with no regrets, I took the plunge and registered for the full about 30 minutes ago. I'm just hoping that the weather doesn't change again!