Oh Well..

 
So I didn't get into Boston.  The cutoff was 2:09 which means I wasn't even close.  I needed to run 3:12:51.  Looking back at my BQ run in May, it didn't matter that the last 7 km was into a brutal headwind, I was already behind by the 35km mark. Relying on the BQ estimates that other people were calculating proved to be a bad choice.  The method they used was somewhat accurate last year, but not remotely accurate this year.

This has had me rethinking the Boston qualifying attempts.  The past 2 years I've just tried to squeak in by using the previous years cutoff as a guide.  This hasn't worked and the issue is that everyone is now aiming to beat their BQ time by 5 minutes to ensure that they can register for the first week.  While it would be easy to say that I should just train for 3:10, the part of me that thinks back to how hard it was 8 years ago to run a 3:10:23 on higher weekly mileage and I start to question whether it's even doable now.  But of course, I don't actually have to run a 3:10 as I just need to clear enough time to make the cutoff so a slip to 3:12 during a 3:10 attempt might be okay.  This is a lot better than initially aiming for 3:12 which doesn't leave a lot of room for error.

Another side of me says hey I can wait a few years and my BQ time increases to 3:25, but I thought it would be neat to aim to run Boston at least once in each age category which means I would need to do it within the next 2 years before I age-up into the next category.

I haven't really tried to train for a 3:10 marathon in a long while so I guess I'll have to see how it goes, if it even goes at all.  It's easy for me to say now what I intend to do over the winter, but you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men...