I have decided that I want to run two marathons this Autumn, and I am already committed to running the Marine Corps Marathon. I found out about a new marathon in New Hampshire, the Manchester Marathon. This would be an ideal race to run, because we have friends in Manchester that we could stay with and it would be fun to run an inaugural race. The unfortunate part of the race is that it falls one week behind the Marine Corps Marathon.
The other marathon options in New Hampshire are the Clarence Demar and the New Hamsphire Marathon in Bristol. They are a week apart from one another, but are both a month before the Marine Corps Marathon.
The fourth option is to jump into my first ultramarathon. The Pisgah 50k Mountain Trail Race is in Western New Hampshire, it is over a month and a half before Marine Corps, and it would theoretically be easier to recover from a trail race than a road race.
Of course, the problems there are that I only have a month and a half to prepare for a race that is around 5 miles longer than the farthest that I have ever raced. It would also be the farthest that I have ever run on trails. I also do not know anybody that lives out that way that I could stay with before the race.
On one day’s contemplation, I am leaning towards either running at Pisgah or doing a couple of marathons back to back and running in Manchester. I am pretty sold on running in New Hampshire, since it is closer than Rhode Island and I have already run a marathon in the rest of the New England states. What are your thoughts? Are you running any of those races? What would you do in my shoes? Do you have any suggestions for races that I may have missed?
An understandably tough choice. The ultra could serve as a great long training run for the Marine Corps Marathon, if you can look at it that way. Regardless, that should be a good amount of time to recover. For what it’s worth, I ran the MDI Marathon three weeks after the Vermont 50, and got a PR out of it (though admittedly, wasn’t anything terribly fast to begin with).
I would suggest running the ultra. You will recover faster from the trail run and a 50K is just a long marathon anyway.
I agree with Jamie and Brian. The ultra would be a wonderful training run that would allow you to recover and rest while feeling strong and accomplished. Last year I successfully ran the Pineland 50k in May then basically piddled around in the summer with a bit of cross training with limited running. I then ran the NH marathon with a PR BQ time (7th woman runner), then less than 1 month later ran Marine Corp in DC (63 our of 1200 in my age group) and BQ’d. I did very little running in the month between NH and Marine corp. I mountain/road biked, did a lot of yoga, some swimming and easy trail runs. The Ultra was a great personal and successful first for me and really boosted my confidence, as well as gave me a great core. Go for it!
Thanks for the advice! I did wind up registering for the race a couple of weeks ago. I am looking forward to running it!
If I feel good I might run the Manchester Marathon too, but that will be a post-marine corps decision.