Part of the charm of this course is in the length; I don't know of any other 10-mile races. You generally have 5- and 10-K's, or you have half- and full-marathons. So this is a nice in-betweener. It's also fun because I have a certain nostalgic fondness for Flint, which is the only city I know that gets dumped on and insulted more than Detroit or perhaps Gary, Indiana. Yes, it's a city in desperate economic straits, but the people always seem so genuine to me. I love running through both the nice parts AND the not-so-nice parts of town.
Anyway, I had pretty low expectations because I haven't been running very well lately. My longer runs seem to be falling flat, for a variety of reasons: sore legs, extreme heat, perhaps a little bit of runner burn-out. I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to improve on last season's time, which is my general goal for any race that I'm repeating.
Last year when I ran the CRIM, it was the first race for me after I broke two ribs at the end of July (a long story that involves a wheelbarrow. It's not pretty). Actually, that isn't quite accurate. It was literally the first time I ran AT ALL after breaking the ribs. My goal then was to finish in under two hours, which is a 12-minute-mile pace. I finished in 1:53 and felt pretty good about it.
So you can see how, without having any major injury issues, it should have been no problem to beat last year's time. Still, my previous weeks' poor runs had me worried. When I started yesterday, I felt like I was keeping a good pace. I finished the first mile in 10:15 and thought I had a good chance to keep a similar pace throughout the remainder of the course. And it turned out pretty much like I hoped; I finished in 1:45, averaging about 10:30 per mile and beating last year's time by a full eight minutes. Solid.
The race gave me hope that the marathon isn't an impossible dream. Yes, 26 miles is WAY more than 10. But I do find that once I get into a groove on a long route, I can keep it up for a considerable distance. So I'm still thinking that I'll be able to get there in the next two months. We'll see. I admit that I've started having second thoughts about it, and I can easily (maybe TOO easily) just decide to run the half-marathon instead, so it isn't the end of the world if I go 13 instead of 26. But for now, I'm still in marathon mode. I'll need to kick up my weekend runs to get to that point; I'm looking at a 12-miler for next weekend, and I'll continue to add about a mile a week until I get to at least 18-20. We'll see how that goes.
In my last blog, I mentioned that I was going to talk about running music sometime soon. I'm still planning that for next time. Till then...
No comments:
Post a Comment