Decided to push it a little bit tonight. Ran the first 6-plus at well under 9:00 pace, then took it up a notch on the last leg home. Turned out the last .7 was at sub-MP, which brought the overall average down to 8:33. If I can get to where this kind of pace is fairly easy, I'll be in good shape for St. George, Boston or anywhere else. Wasn't quite that easy tonight. I had no trouble maintaining it, but I was working to do it. Sweating pretty good, too, despite temps in probably the upper 40s.
Just for fun, plugged my half-marathon PR, which comes back as my best race result on the VDOT charts, into McMillan's calculator and hit the button. The predicted marathon time that came back was one second off my Memphis time. Then when I plugged in the Memphis time, the half time that came back was exactly what I ran in Conway 14 months ago. It did show that my 5K PR is a little soft, which does not surprise me given that I ran it under summerlike conditions, and that the 10K is a little softer, again no surprise given that I ran THAT in a thunderstorm and had to run some extra distance to dodge huge puddles in the road. But that gives me some targets for the spring and fall. Now I have to decide whether to focus on the shorter races for the spring, or just d general training and run a couple of marys just for fun. Need to decide something quick; the price for LRM goes up on 1/1/10. | 