It's Almost Time

That's right. One of my favorite days of the year has almost arrived. I am, of course, talking about the ING New York City Marathon, which I'll be running on November 4th with my good friend Sharon, who will be coming all the way from Dallas! This will be her very first NYC Marathon, though she's done close to twenty in her career and has qualified for Boston multiple times.

Running has been good in the last couple of weeks, though I didn't get in a long run last weekend and I really should have. I think I'll be okay without it, but it's bothering me a lot. Aside from that, though, I've been able to get a few days in of 800 sprints and tempo runs. Those are the kinds of workouts I'll need to increase my overall speed.

Also, I just need to learn to start pushing harder on long runs. If I can run a half marathon at an average pace of 8:15 minutes per mile, I can probably do the same for 14 miles and beyond if I made a concerted effort to work up to it. It's just going to take some conscious trying on my part.

I also decided to do the Brooklyn Marathon (I hope it hasn't sold out because I haven't registered yet) as at least one of my sub-4 attempts. There are a couple of options after that, but I'll focus on Brooklyn for now.

Woop!

All Aboard

I would like to clarify that the goal of this post is less self-realization and more a logical study of where an entire year of training has put me. And I’m starting to have a sneaking suspicion that it’s a lot closer to something big than I ever imagined.

The Staten Island Half Marathon was on Sunday. I went into it expecting to do decently, but not all that well because I haven’t done speed work since the summer. To my delight and utter shock, I ran a personal best of 1:47:58. It’s not even 30 seconds faster than my previous PR, but considering the speed work thing and the fact that I haven’t even raced a half marathon since Brooklyn (almost 5 months ago), I was mildly dumbfounded about the whole thing.

This got me thinking. Imagine one of those montages in an hourlong crime drama in which the protagonist (brooding detective, mystery novel writer, quirky consultant, main character of whatever your flavor of police procedural happens to be). That was like me on Sunday afternoon and yesterday. Various scenes, ideas and facts started flashing through my brain. Synapses were firing and I began to make connections and develop hypotheses. My eyebrow is sore from being so ponderously raised for such an extended period of time, but more importantly, something that should have been obvious to me a long time ago became crystal clear.

I’ve been running a volume of miles that I would never have thought myself capable of maintaining and spent the better part of the year training for an Ironman. I’m in really good shape. There’s no artificially inflated bravado here, it’s just fact. All these race results should have been telling me this from the beginning of the summer, but I’ve been writing them off as…well, I don’t know. Maybe not even writing them off, but also not extrapolating what they could mean about the future.

And now I’ll get to the point. I now hope, very legitimately, to run a sub-4 hour marathon before the year is over. Okay, fine, that’s a goal I’ve had from day 1 of this year. Let’s go one step further. I’m not sure there will ever be a point in my life when I’ve built up such a solid training foundation. If ever there was a time to seek the holy grail of marathon running, it is now. If I can run a big marathon to close out the year, I think I stand a decent chance of running an even bigger one come spring.

Months ago, I wrote that I intended to enjoy this ride, wherever it took me. I’ll do you one better, past self. Fate’s been relegated to the passenger seat and I’ll be steering from now on. This train is headed for Boston.



Amortya ran a not-too-shabby 1:50!
Yes, it's a phone screenshot. So sue me.



Making Funnies and Making Up Miles

It's a good thing this is my own blog and I'm therefore held to no standards of timeliness. I still need to finish my IM stuff, which, as I worried, sort of got weighed down by its own magnitude and quantity (and my wordiness).

It's been too long since my last post. Hate it when that happens. We got some amazing news a few weeks ago, which is that my comedy group was accepted to the PIT Sketchfest here in NYC. We'll be doing a short (25 minute) set on October 13th that I'm really excited about. So excited, in fact, that I've spent much of my time since then working on our new website (shameless plug: chupacabraconspiracy.blogspot.com).

Been busy with that and 2012 Miles in 2012 and marathon training. Fortunately, marathon training has helped with my 2012 goal, but as of this writing, I'm at 1481.84 miles for the year, which is 41.66 miles behind target. This is certainly recoverable but it's been a challenge staying on task, particularly with the show coming up.

Like I said, though, I'm happy to have the long weekend runs to make up for busy weeknights when I get no running in or less than I'd hoped for.

This weekend I'll be running my fourth Staten Island Half Marathon. I'm very much looking forward to it and hoping to run not too much slower than 1:55. We'll see. My speedwork in the second half of this year has been really sub par.

Anyway, feels good to do a little catching up. I hope everyone's had a good fall race season so far. Good luck to anyone doing Chicago this weekend!