Tomorrow Is The Big Day (SFHM1)

Tomorrow is the San Francisco Marathon.

I checked the weather, and it looks almost perfect.  Partly cloudy.  53F at the start and approximately 57F when I finish the first half.  For F, it'll be around 58 or 59 when she finishes the full. A little bit of wind, but nothing in the double digits.

This week was a nice easy taper.  Very short on mileage, but all of the running miles were at average target race pace or faster.

M: 2 short walks of 0.5 miles or so.

T: 1.12 walking in SF to client meetings; 1.57 miles walking in the PM.

W: nice quick track ladder to work on turnover.  (200/200 RI; 400/400 RI; 600/200 RI; 400/400 RI; 200/200 RI)  Splits: 42; 1:51; 2:53; 2:00; 39.  That last 200 chasing F was quite fun.  5:12 mile pace.  By far the fastest I've ran in a very long time. (some w/u and c/d for a total of 2.25 miles)

Th: Short cut-down of 3 miles (first 1.6 with E, rest by myself).  9:24; 8:54; 8:47.  Avg pace 9:01.  walking c/d & w/u.

F: Rest

Sat: Shake-out run.  0.5 miles jogging w/u.  1 mile at target race pace/effort (8:54, a little fast, but it felt good).  0.3 jogging c/d. 0.1 walk.

I took a look at my training for the Rock 'n Roll AZ half. And, despite feeling like it was much less effort, the work I've done has been fairly comparable this time around.  I owe this to my running friends, for sure.  The weekly track efforts were as difficult or more difficult than what I pushed myself through in the 10 weeks before AZ.  Only all I had to do was show up.  What a great benefit!

The main difference between AZ and this time is that AZ was 7 weeks after CIM and this one is 10 weeks after the SLO Marathon.  I'm hopeful the extra 3 weeks of recovery will help me, but of course, the trade off is that I had the last 3 high-mileage weeks of CIM as my first 3 weeks of training for AZ, whereas this time around, I kept my mileage more in the half marathon range.  Even so, I'm only short 18.5 miles over the whole 10 week cycle from the AZ training.  That's just 1.85 miles less per week.  Color me surprised.

Taper has been going very well.  So, I guess I'll stay positive and see whether I can't surprise myself tomorrow.