Hard Core?

Ok....I am a little behind on my blogging so I have a lot to say today.

First I want to talk about my run this morning. Yes as a matter of fact I did go running this morning. When the alarm first went off my gut reaction was to stay in bed, but the second time the alarm went off I figured the least I could do was peak out the window and see how it looked. I checked the backyard and it looked pretty clear so I went for it. I checked weather.com and it said 33 feels like 23 so I put on some extra clothes and wore my old ski jacket and walked out the door into a blizzarding wind storm. Maybe this was not the best idea. Nothing was icy though so it couldn't be that cold. And then Madison would not get in the car. I came very close to leaving her because she was being such a brat but instead we both walked inside and started over. This time I put her leash on before we went outside and then she went right into the car. The actually run wasn't too bad. We went 8 miles (I'm rounding up). I kept going back and forth between felling hard core for being out in this weather and feeling like a wus because I was wearing such an outrageous running outfit. I ended up decided that I was hard core after I got home and my pants were soaked to the knees and my shoes and socks were dripping with slush. I am definitely glad that I went though, just like I always am! :)

The next thing I want to talk about is my Half Marathon race that I did on Sunday. The weather was fabulous and so was the race! I went in with a goal of breaking 2 hours to run 13.1 miles. I was a little nervous in the beginning because it was very crowded and I am not very good at weaving through large crowds of people. In the end I think it might have been to my advantage though because every time I would go to pass through people I would speed up so that we wouldn't trip over each other. In my head every mile I would calculate out what time I wanted my watch to say (9 times # of miles ran) and then compare it to what my watch actually said. I was a little off in the beginning but by mile 5 I was right on target. Then I started getting ahead of target which was nice because I was running faster than I usually do so I wasn't sure if I was going to die (like legs stop moving not actually dying) at the end. I was building myself a nice little cushion in case I had to walk the last mile. Luckily I didn't have to! I finished in 1 hour and 53 minutes!! A new personal best from me and 7 minutes faster than my goal time. I was ecstatic! Even though I finished 1079th out of 2706 I felt like I won! It was great!

Now I had to figure out what that half marathon time meant to my potential new marathon time. I remembered that we got an email from our coach (Jack Fultz the 1976 Champion of the Boston Marathon) that included a formula to calculate your marathon time from races of other distances. So I open up the email and open up a spreadsheet (yes!) and try to figure out my expected finish time. The rule is that each time you double the distance you can expect your per mile pace to increase by 5%. So my pace for the Half was 8:39 per mile. Multiply that by 1.05 and my marathon pace should be 9:05. Multiply that by 26.2 miles and voila I am done with the marathon in 3 hours in 58 minutes!!!! If only it were that easy! :):)