Strategy: I Has It

Week 11: 2/21/11 - 2/27/11 (7 weeks remain)

This week was unusual mix of highs and lows the likes of which I've not seen in quite some time.

Monday: Off day.

Tuesday: 10 miles (6 in the AM, 4 more in the PM).

Wednesday: 9 miles, general aerobic

Thursday: Spent all day working in lab - didn't run.

Friday: 11 miles on the treadmill with 9 miles at 7:00 pace.

Saturday: Didn't run today; went to the Ivy+ Scotch tasting from 2 to 6 instead. SO MUCH SCOTCH - DELICIOUS DELICIOUS SCOTCH. Turns out that for the most part, I prefer Speyside single malts (I recommend the Glenlivet 15/18 and the Macallan 15 Fine Oak), although the Laphroaig 25 was also quite nice :-). Got back around 8:00 PM, and then spent the next 2 hours or so guzzling Gatorade and waiting for the room to stop spinning :-P.

Sunday: Woke up at 7:00 to drive out to Hyannis for the Hyannis Half-Marathon. Unfortunately, it turned out that it was snowing when we got there, and there were far more runners than we were expecting. We also got there about half an hour later than we had planned due to increased traffic delays from the inclement weather, so we didn't really have time to properly warm up/stretch/use the bathroom prior to the race. Given this set of circumstances, I decided that I was probably not going to have a very good day (particularly given the lack of speed work in my training thus far), and therefore made the decision just to treat this as a "fun" run/harder LT workout. Bearing that in mind, and the fact that I really needed to use the commode after the 1.5 hour car ride prior to the race, and the fact that we were being chip-timed, I decided that I would just wait in the damn line for the port-a-pottys and start the race late, reasoning that on the plus side, it meant that I would have people to run with for most of the race (in previous longer races, I've often found myself running more or less alone, which is kinda boring/not good psychologically).

So as it turned out, I ended up crossing the start line ~10 minutes after the actual gun went off, and had to spend the first 3 miles or so dodging my way through relatively thick crowds of nonserious runners. On the plus side, having so many noncompetitive guys around gave me a constant sequence of people to pass, and which in turn helped keep the motivation to pass (and correspondingly, the pace) up. (It also helped that there were more than a few really cute girls in running spandex, which is always a powerful motivator to run strong :-P).

Anyway, the point is that by starting 10 minutes late, I inadvertently ensured that there were going to be large numbers of people to pick off almost all the way to the end of the course - I didn't really start to see the crowd thin out until around mile 9, by which point I had started to catch up to the tail end of the semi-serious athletes. Again, since I'd mostly been focusing on passing people up until that point, I hadn't actually been paying that much attention to my pacing - I'd mostly been going by feel, with the intention of getting a solid LT workout in, but without necessarily intentionally trying to run all crazy (for example, I'd caught up to my friend about 2 miles into the race and paused to have a brief chat with her before continuing on). However, at the 9 mile mark, I was starting to feel fatigued, so I thought I'd check the old watch and see how I was doing - and then realized that I'd just passed the 9 mile mark sometime around 55:00. At that point, I decided to just try and hammer the last part of the race in, since this was definitely PR pace.

As it turned out, I actually ended up running (what felt like) pretty even splits all the way from around mile 3 up to the end of mile 12; I even managed to up the pace through the last mile, with a solid kick in the last 600 meters or so. I haven't gotten the official results back, but my unofficial wristwatch time was 1:19:33, which comes out to 6:04 pace - about a 6:00 PR. Not bad given that I'd spent the previous night getting plastered on Scotch and the first three miles being snowed on :-).

However, more interesting to me than the PR itself is the strategic implications of how the race unfolded. The fact that I started late, which resulted in my having lots of bodies in front of me to chase, seems to me to have been an important factor in maintaining focus and motivation throughout the race itself. Now, consider the following facts:

1. In spite of my less-than-stellar speed/LT training thus far, it looks like I've at least got reasonable levels of top-end speed and LT pace.
2. At the Boston Marathon proper, I can also expect that there are going to be lots of runners who are faster than I am, and therefore also lots of bodies ahead of me throughout the entire race.

Up until now, my training goal for Boston had just been completion, as I wasn't convinced that my training thus far could support anything much more ambitious. However, I think that the Hyannis half demonstrates that my level of fitness may actually be better than what I had previously estimated it to be, particularly given the lack of "proper preparation" the night before the race and the less-than-ideal race conditions themselves. Given that the race conditions at Boston will likely be conducive to maintaining the psychological focus necessary to perform at a high level, I think the question before me now is: do I just go for completion as I had previously planned, or should I go balls out for the PR and risk a blowup?

Total weekly mileage: 43 <-- Low, but of high quality :-).