I have decided to halt all marathon training indefinitely & have joined a soccer team for the Spring season. When I reviewed my training, I realized that I ran a 3:20 marathon in Oct. 2010 after only having run 400 miles in the previous 9 months, including 190 miles in the previous 3 months, and a whopping 60 miles in the 30 days leading up to the marathon. At this time, I stopped playing competitive soccer & channeled my competitive juices into running ... and my time dropped to 3:06 ... and was enroute to a sub 3 ... until I got injured. In retrospect, taking 14 minutes off my marathon time ... or dropping it another 6 ... just is not that important to me in the grand scheme of things. I am proud to have run the PR times I have, but improving on them further is not that important ... I would rather play soccer & just enjoy running when I choose to. We all set goals ... and somewhere along the line, my goals went from running a marathon to getting a BQ to breaking sub 3 ... but why? I can not answer that question ... but feel like if I don't break the cycle ... when I run a sub 3, my goal would simply become to run a 2:55 ... that is just my competitive nature and desire to continually improve. But again ... if I step back & ask ... why would you want to run a 2:55 marathon? I have no answer, and certainly not one that justifies the commitment it would require in my own mind and sacrifices ... like not playing soccer. If one day I happen to cross a 5k finish line at sub 18:30, I will probably entertain a 16 week training cycle to go after a sub 3 ... but only if that happens first. The jury is out on if I will run Boston this year ... sometimes we have things other things in life that are more important than running ... and this is one of those times for me.
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