CLEVELAND MARATHON this Sunday

Well, the training is in the bag..about 420 miles in the last 90 days. This is the best buildup I've been able to do in a while.

Here's a bar chart of the last 90days of runs

Two 20 milers in there about about 10m/m. My training was pretty bad last year so I have ben doing  4:40ish marathons for the last few.  Now, I hope to do more like sub-4:30 this weekend. But mostly I want to finish strong and pace properly.

This year I've got three races on the books and hope to get back to higher mileages. Here's my mileages per year since I started running. At 500 miles this year so far I'm on track to get to about 1200 ..more typical for me.

Date	Runs	Miles	Pace	BPM	YPB
2008-01-01 Tue	61	357.4	10:24	118.2	1.463
2009-01-01 Thu	173	1269.3	10:46	122.0	1.470
2010-01-01 Fri	147	1117.1	10:06	122.6	1.473
2011-01-01 Sat	180	1129.0	10:11	124.0	1.436
2012-01-01 Sun	170	1163.3	9:48	125.8	1.454
2013-01-01 Tue	191	1414.4	9:36	124.8	1.492
2014-01-01 Wed	213	1605.9	9:57	119.1	1.521
2015-01-01 Thu	144	916.2	10:43	114.9	1.488
2016-01-01 Fri	78	501.3	10:02	120.2	1.471
Summary	1357	9473.9	10:08	122.1	1.478

The weather forecast for this Sunday is pretty good: some showers temps cool at 45-55. I don't mind the rain too much. The only bad thing is there is some 8-15mph winds expected. Luckily the last 8 miles it's all a tailwind.  Still not sure if I'm going to take pictures during the race..probably not since it's going to be wet...and not sunny so the shots will tend to come out blurry.

I have cut a pace band for 4:30, and I will hold that pace and see how I feel at mile 18  at the downwind turnaround. If I'm lucky and feel really strong, I'll speed up a tad. Cheers!

RunDown: Quarry Lakes Marathon 2015 (#26)

This was my 26th marathon (since March 2009 at age 53) and also my first marathon in the 60-69 age group

(Warning: probably moving to 60-is-the-new-40.blogspot.com shortly..I will link to it from this blog)

I haven't been posting much, lots of work and travel stuff going on and well, not much to say about running these days.

My mileage for this year has been low for me, but I'm intending to return to normal levels in 2016. 

Ready for the start

I have run a lot of 'easy' marathons (ie. slow) since Oct 2014 (Chicago). I have found that with not much training I can clock a 4:45...

I signed up for Quarry Lakes because the timing worked out well w.r.t holiday travel coming up...and it is dead flat. It's also close to home and cheap. A nasty cold that seemed to hit everybody at work and home took out a few weeks of training and my training was already spotty.

This is not a super scenic course but it's pleasant and has great bike paths and crushed gravel surfaces that are easy on the legs. It runs along a river for most of the way but the river is not very full of water these days so there's mostly brush and grasses on the banks.

Like most full trail marathons it's two loops of the half marathon course.

The good thing about this course is that you get to see people a bit more than a one-way non-out-and-back course. It also doesn't have a lot of corners so the tangents run themselves 8)  (I ran exactly 26.2 on the garmin, which is pretty rare.)

The forecast was for cloudy and chance of rain during the second loop, but luckily the rain held off.

I started the race targeting a 10:30 pace, hoping to do a bit under 4:45 but thinking that might be a big mistake.  At about mile 7 I meet up with a very nice fellow Andrew Poon and what with talking with him we slowed down a bit. I didn't mind this as I've learned the the first half of a marathon should just be run what feels like crazy slow when undertrained. 

We had a very nice chat about running...he had also discovered running later in life and I found out he was a 6 grade teacher in the local area for 25 years...talk about tough!

Andrew ran the half, and so after that I dropped the hammer a teeny bit and sped up to 10:00 pace..which was a big mistake as when I got to mile 22 the course turned from downwind to upwind and BAM...ouch..made a huge difference. I had my jacket spun up and tied around my waste for most of the race but when I hit that wind and slowed down my solar plexus started feeling really cold after a bit and the jacket was nice to have.

Ended up walk-running to the finish so I would have been better served holding to the same paces as the first half..probably would have saved 4 min or so. But pretty good considering. 

First RED finishing shirt I have gotten. Nice!

Finished! (2nd place medal too.)

4:41:47 finishing time

27 / 54 overall

2 / 3 in 60-69 age group

2015-12-20 Sun
Split	Miles	Pace
1	1.00	10:25
2	1.00	10:26
3	1.00	10:24
4	1.00	10:01
5	1.00	10:22
6	1.00	10:25
7	1.00	10:31
8	1.00	11:09
9	1.00	10:48
10	1.00	10:48
11	1.00	10:42
12	1.00	10:32
13	1.00	10:43
14	1.00	10:44
15	1.00	10:30
16	1.00	10:33
17	1.00	10:03
18	1.00	9:59
19	1.00	9:32
20	1.00	10:05
21	1.00	10:18
22	0.40	11:31
23	1.00	11:32
24	1.00	11:55
25	1.00	12:32
26	1.00	12:36
27	0.75	12:13
Sum	26.2	10:46