2 Weeks

The Vancouver Marathon is now less than 2 weeks away.

That statement right there (yup, ^ that one) is both scary and exciting.

First, might I say, that ~holy crap~  the last 14 weeks (?) of training has absolutely flown by. Something tells me, the next two weeks will zip past equally as quick.

Training is starting to taper off now. I’ve still got some decent workouts to do over the next 2 weeks, but the hard work is mostly done.

It’s been good ('it' in this case, being this training cycle). Really good in fact. I keep saying that, and I actually believe it. I really truly feel like I’ve been running well. Strong even. I’m getting better at judging my pace, and I feel like my head is usually in a good, positive space when I’m tackling a workout.

This past Saturday I had one of my final ‘long’ tempo workouts (the main part of the workout being 90min at marathon pace). Instructions also included a note about “being honest with it” - 'it', in this case, being marathon pace.

I often go a little faster than what my planned marathon pace is, and I know I can’t do that on race day. The last thing I want to do is to go out too hard and suffer through the back half of the marathon. Been there, done that. The agony of IMC ‘12 is still fresh enough in my mind that I don’t want a repeat (granted, that was a fueling issue, but still – I imagine the suffering would be similar in a ‘fade from the front’ race strategy). Anyway, I know I need to be able to settle into my desired pace right away at the marathon and not sprint out of the gates. Patience should be my motto for the day.

So, back to Saturday’s workout...
I felt like this was a great success and a very teeny-tiny, minor failure at the same time.

Let’s talk about the success first, because, well, that’s more fun. Simply, I felt great through the whole 90min at marathon pace. I felt relaxed and comfortable and like everything was really clicking and I was in a good mindset the whole time. The time flew by and my legs were turning over nicely. Good stuff.

My teeny-tiny minor failure would be that my pace was, once again, a little quicker than my goal marathon pace – especially for the first km or two (oops). When I saw my first km split, I did try and reel it in, and managed to settle down a bit, so that’s good, right?

Anyway, overall I was really happy with the workout. It leaves me feeling pretty confident heading into my taper.

2 weeks to go! (Have I mentioned that yet?)