Myrtle Beach marathon or Austin Marathon for a BQ?

[Lucia]

Has anyone ran either of those marathons? Which one would you say has best BQ potential?
Thanks!

Lucia 

[Bonnie]

Lucia, I posted to you on the other thread ... Myrtle Beach is much flatter, the new Austin course is tough.  Myrtle Beach "can" have a few windy miles, but when it is calm it is pretty fast -- pretty view along the beach though (the windy part).

Bonnie

[Lucia]

Thank you so much Bonnie! I guess with your info, I'd probably pick Myrtle Beach over Austin to qualify for Boston... Napa Valley sounds pretty nice too, and it'd be nice to see you there... what's your expected finish time for that one?

I know I sound impatient... but I really want to qualify and run Boston in 2009, so I don't want to wait too long to make sure the race doesn't fill up... thanks again!

[Bonnie]

I would like to break 3:30 but would happy with anything under 3:45 (BQ for me is 4 hours, I think).

I would consider Myrtle Beach, but I was hoping to do the marathon a little later -- I wanted to try to "peak" for PF Chang's 1/2 before doing specific marathon training.  I will talk to my coach about it next weekend (I will be seeing him then) maybe they are not mutually exclusive goals ...

Bonnie

[Sasha Pachev]

I ran Myrtle Beach in 2000. It has a fast time potential, but when I ran it the problem was that I did not come in a fast time condition contrary to what I thought, and that made the time even slower because I started out faster than my fitness dictated.

I would guess that the current version of Austin is slower than Myrtle Beach. One thing to beware of, though, is that it is right by the ocean and you can get bad winds. However, those would probably be cross winds as most of the course goes along the beach.