Oh Boy !!!

There was the slightest hint of "coolness" in the air this morning. It felt great! So good in fact that I had to "bridle the horses" at the beginning of this morning's run.

I ended up with the following:

7 miles @ 8:40 pace


I was happy with the effort. I was still a little sore from Saturday's long run but felt fine once I got going. I wore the new Mizuno's. I'll probably be wearing them the rest of the way now.

I've been using the training schedule from Runners World for several months now and I've just realized that I don't know exactly what marathon finish time I'm training for. It's not one of the inputs when setting up the Smart Coach. It seems I'm running at an 8:46 pace the rest of my workouts (except for speed and tempo runs). I wonder if that's the marathon pace I'm training for? That calculates out to a 3:49:41 marathon.

I'm toying with the idea of testing my fitness level with a half marathon this coming Saturday. My thinking is that at least I would have a better idea of exactly where I'm at. Stephanie will be in Cancun so there's some question of whether the Chicago marathon crew that I usually run with will have an organized run on Saturday. My scheduled run is for 12 miles. This happens to be the exact distance ChampionsFit - Green is running. I've still not introduced myself to the group and it seems they're rather disorganized (judging from the discussion board entries).

On Saturday there is a half marathon in Dallas and one in Shawnee, Oklahoma. These are the closest I can find. If I run one of these 2 weeks prior to the marathon, will I have time to recover? It seems like I should. At the moment, I'm kind of liking the idea of flying into Oklahoma City late Friday evening, running Saturday morning then flying home. The flights look okay.