Fast Running Blog

I am thinking of doing this in 09.  Has anyone done this before?  Did you have any trouble getting into St. George based on your Grand Slam runs?  And what is the date of the 2009 St. George marathon?  I have been looking everywhere but I can't find the date.  I am assuming that it will take place the first weekend in October as this year...

Bill Cobler does it every year, so he is a great source of info.  Andy Browning also did it this year.  Paul Petersen won it a few years ago.  Ask them what they think.

If you sign up for the slam, you are guaranteed entry into St. George.  And it should be Oct 3, 2009- always the first Sat of Oct, barring a change.

The Grand Slam is definitely a physical challenge. I don't recommend it to most people, as it gives you a high risk of injury. If you do it, just make sure that you have a good 6 months of base first (min 70-80 mpw for several months). Otherwise you will be a knee injury waiting to happen. You will have no problem getting into St. George to do the Slam.

I did it in 2006 and am in the middle of it right now.  Having a good base of consistent mileage going into it is very important.  That is the best way to recover from marathon to marathon.  The smart approach is to run the first and last marathons (Ogden and SGM) at full effort and treat the other 2 as training runs.  Of course, I'm not very smart and have a hard time not putting a full effort into any race that I run.  Just repeating what Jon said, SGM should be on Oct 3 next year and you get guaranteed entry into SGM if you run the Slam.

Yeah, the middle two will definitely be training runs, especially with so little time in between TOU and St. George.  So, which one would you recommend, the Park City Marathon or the Deseret Morning News marathon.  I know that neither of these is a fast marathon but I have heard that Park City is very difficult.  I would like to do the easier of the two.

Park City is more difficult in the sense that it has more uphill but Des News is brutal on your body.  I would definitely recommend Park City over Des News just because the risk of injury at Des News is higher.  The only drawback is that you have less recovery time if you run Park City.

Having done the Grand Slam a number of times, but never actually competing for a place in the standings, I have found the Grand Slam can be a good motivational tool for getting out and training, but I viewed most of the runs as training runs peaking for St. George.  I will say, in 2006 when I had not increased my mileage I found it was very difficult to recover from Top of Utah in only 2 weeks.