Happy Holidays

Catching Up

I haven't updated lately because there hasn't been much to tell. The two weeks post marathon were spent celebrating and recovering. I did plenty of the former and probably not enough of the latter. I say I didn't recover enough because I have a couple of nagging pains that I don't know what to do about. I want to see if these pains will respond to ice and NSAIDs before I take time off.

I'm afraid of losing too much fitness by taking time off because my running has been so sporadic over the past six weeks. It's been taper, run a marathon, then recover. The mileage and quality just hasn't been there except for that small matter of running a Boston Qualifying 26.2.

Mountain Mist

I want to leverage my marathon fitness to have a good race at Mountain Mist. Wow, that's less than four weeks away! If I take time off, I won't have any fitness to leverage! If I have a couple of good weeks, a good taper, and a perfect day, I think I have a shot at 5 hours and a top 20 finish at Mountain Mist. If I take a couple of weeks off, I have no chance for a good race. Then, I could just treat it like a fun run and maybe circle it for 2011. Ugh.

My Crazy Idea

And then there's this other crazy idea I have... Right now, I am planning to run the Country Music Marathon in Nashville. My plan is to train like mad for that, and then go 3:00 or bust. Yeah, I know I'll bust. It's a harder course. It will be warmer weather. It's probably unrealistic to think I could even PR at that race.

I ran a conservative race at RCM, and I know I was in better than 3:11 shape. I had a goal to BQ and I was not going to risk that in any way. Now that I have the BQ, I can get aggressive. If I bonk at CMM, so what? A DNF or walking the last miles and not breaking 4:00 won't be the end of the world. At least I will have tried! I probably need a few more failures to learn a little bit more about racing. And I think there is a chance of success, or I wouldn't entertain the idea...