9 weeks to MCM 2016

Did a 16.5 miler today at sub-10m/m average pace. This was a 37.6 mile week. 

My current thinking on MCM pace is around 10m/m (assuming it's not hot that day).  So far I'm building on my SFM 2016 training and it's going well. MCM has some hills but way way less than SFM so my 4:33 there might be a 4:22-ish given my extra training as well.

My A-goal is of course to get even splits and no fade...pushed quite hard in the 2nd half of SFM and the wheels did come off a little at mile 25-ish.  I lost about 90seconds due to that. No big deal but it was interesting to feel the wall come on quite quickly from mile 24 to 25. 

I'll know more after my 20 milers how the 10 m/m pace idea seems.

I checked out a lot of running blog recaps for information about MCM, and it's amazing how many bloggers just drop the blog completely. 

I'm almost guilty of that but I still make occasional entries and I always make a entries for race recaps. I'm still running!

MCM will be marathon #29, and speaking of that I bought a medal holder (FINALLY) ..I had been using push-pins to stick them up.

Alas, it's almost already full..there's a few half marathons and some age group 2nd/3rd place medals from some trail marathons plus the 28 marathons...so I'll probably have to buy another one in a few months ;)

The caption on the top says "You're only one run away from a good day!". I liked that one the best..my own motto is "Any day you can run a Marathon is a Great Day!"

Gotta get on the ball with finding Marathon #30 and #31! 

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In other news I found this really interesting site called Marathon Investigation. It turns out there are people (actually it seems quite a few) that CHEAT at marathons in order to do things like qualify for Boston. Finding these cheaters is the focus of the site. 

Many people seem to do course-cutting and some lie about their age. 

As I was flipping through the postings on the site I found an entry about the Cleveland Marathon I was at! There was a cheater that course cut that was even in my age group and looked fast. He'd done this at several other races before including previous years Cleveland race.

The dead giveaway for these people is they miss some timing mats and the split where they didn't hit the mat has a crazy fast pace. E.g. they run a normal 10 min/mile pace but they end up running from mile 14 to mile 20, missing a mat at mile 15 say, and the time for that segment ends up implying a 6:30 m/m pace. 

Any runner knows that ain't nobody able to run a 6:30 pace late in a marathon that is normally running several minutes slower.

So you look for missed mats and then crazy fast split that's out of place for that runner's abilities (as shown by previous races too). 

Luckily the race directory figured it out (or the guy at Marathon Investigation let him in on this guys M.O) and he was 'demoted' to the half marathon. And so his 3:37 cheat time looks pretty darn slow for a half marathon.

I'm glad this guy is doing this work. It seems pretty straightforward and not subject to error...i..e he's very careful to not accuse somebody unless the evidence is overwhelming and of course it's the race director's call in the end.

If I ever try to qualify for Boston and succeed, his efforts will make it more likely I get to run it. (Else I get bumped by a cheater..fastest qual time for a given age group gets the slots first..there are a finite number of bibs for each age group slot). 

Why the heck would somebody cheat in a marathon to run at Boston when you didn't deserve it? Crazy.