Marathon Update

You wouldn't have to look too far back in my blog history to read my Victoria Marathon Race Report as my blogging lately has been quite inactive. If you read it you would see that my time last year was 3:36:31 and my goal for this year was to qualify for Boston. Well, as soon as I heard that the Boston qualifying times were dropping by 5 minutes I decided that that goal was too hefty and gave up on that, instead I figured I would settle for a new PR.

My training has been okay lately. I've been getting a good long run in almost every Saturday and have slowly been building up the mileage over the past couple of months. I've also been doing some uphill strength training by doing the Grouse Grind every Wednesday night. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I did it three times one night. I've also been getting some good cross training by biking about 200km a week including a nice weekly ride up Mt Cypress. I feel like I've been doing a lot of the right things.

Lately on my long runs I've been getting some pretty serious pain in my left knee. I've been pushing through the pain to get my mileage up but end up running at an extremely slow pace near the end (about 6 min/km). Honestly, the pain has made me skip a few runs to allow myself to recover which has pushed me off my training plan and I wont be able to reach the distances I was hoping for prior to the marathon.

With the knee pain it seems unlikely that I will achieve a new PR this year and if I did decide to push hard through the pain I run the risk of injury and with big plans for next year, including Ironman Canada, injury is not something that I want right now.

I've been contemplating downgrading to the half but have now decided to stick with the full and take my time with it. I'll probably walk a bunch and take it nice and easy and just have fun with it. I figure I'll come in around 4 hours but I'm okay with that. I can just tick off one more marathon completion. I'm planning on running the BMO marathon in May so I can shoot for a good time for that one. For now I'm just going to do it for the experience and not so much the time.

Race day is October 9 in case anyone wants to come cheer me on. Your smiling faces are always helpful.

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