Run to Win

2009 has come and gone, and 2010 is about to start.

This year didn’t quite go as planned. I was off to a great start, but my training was thrown a bit off between breaking my foot in July, totaling my car in November, and getting a nasty case of bronchitis in December.

This year I ran 339 times for a total distance of 2002.3 miles in 14 days, 6 hours and 43 minutes. That is over 600 miles fewer than I ran in 2008, although total time on my feet was about the same, and was far short of the 3000 to 3500 miles I had planned on running this year. It was still over 100 miles further than I ran in 2007 and over 600 miles further than I ran in 2006.
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My wife is now a lawyer!

Granted, she can’t practice law until she’s admitted by the bar…

But, she has graduated!

I’m very proud of her.

Now back to our regularly scheduled running articles…

I’ve finished writing up my race report for last weekend’s marathon, but I haven’t had a chance to go in and format it yet or add photos. So, here’s a quick link to how I did with my pace prediction before the race:
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Well, race weekend is here. The Cox Sports Marathon is on Sunday morning, so I’m going to hold a contest of sorts this weekend.

Last year, I won the marathon in 2:43:27, which was pretty exciting.

Going into the race this year, I have 3 goals.

1. Break the course record.
2. Set the course record.
3. Run faster than 2:37:00.

I admit it; I’m a bit single minded.

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The folks over at the Cox Sports Marathon finally released the elevation profile for the new course, and it definitely looks like the race is going to be a little easier this year than it was last year.

I resized, rescaled, and merged together the split elevation profile that they are providing so that you can see a side by side comparison between last year’s course and this year’s course:
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2008 has come and gone, and 2009 has started.

I was on vacation at the New Year this year, so my look back over the past year was delayed by a week or so.

In 2008 I ran 390 times for 2612.9 miles in about 14 days, 22 hours and 7 minutes of running. That’s an almost 38% increase in the number of miles that I ran in 2007, and a bit more than the 2300-2500 miles that I had predicted. I also averaged about 40 seconds per mile slower than I averaged in 2007, which I think has had a lot to do with my success and my relative lack of injuries. I have almost doubled my annual mileage since 2006.

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Now that I’ve covered my training schedule for my first 50 miler, here’s what I did in the week or so leading up to the race.

I tapered very aggressively. I basically just did not worry about how much I was going to run from Christmas through the New Year (the race was on January 3^rd.) Any training benefits that I was going to get were achieved well before, and my priority was recovering as much from my training as possible. After a few brief runs after the Christmas holiday, my wife and I flew to Las Vegas which involved a 2 hour bus ride and a 6 hour flight. We arrived in Vegas around 10:00 p.m. which was more like 1:00 a.m. for us. We were relatively tired, given that we normally turn in pretty early.

When you fly into Vegas, you can see the lights from the city (especially the strip) but you can’t see much else at night. Our drive to our resort was similarly unenlightening for what we could expect when we woke up in the morning.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we wake up and step outside for a short run and we see this directly in front of us:
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This Autumn I concentrated on running a fast 5k, a goal that I was only moderately successful at (given the times that I wanted to run versus the times that I did run.) At the beginning of October, I switched my training over to get ready for my first 50 mile race which was at the beginning of January.

My first week was a recovery week from my Summer and Autumn training schedule, and I only ran a couple of times that week. Then I began to build up my mileage in preparation for the race. I did very little speed work outside of a few tempo runs. You can see my weekly mileage for the latter quarter of 2008 here:

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