Hamilton Marathon Tomorrow

So tomorrow morning I will be off to run the Hamilton Marathon. I did a short 2 miles at race pace this morning just to keep the legs loose. Well if not race pace at least it was race effort, it was hard to tell as winds where between 40 and 60km.
No worries though as weather in Hamilton in the morning is supposed to be cool with only 15k winds.

I have finally decided on my splits for this race after talking to a number of different people that I run with. Do you want to know? Sorry not going to tell ya. You will have to read my race report next week to see what the plan was and how it all played out.

Training for this marathon has been quite different than the previous 2 that I have run. In the spring after running Paris I decided to do a fall marathon as my target race. I upped my mileage substantially as well as running 6 days a week. The plan was to work my base mileage up to a around 60-65 miles a week and get at least twelve 20 mile runs in during the training cycle. I managed to accomplish both of these training goals but a funny thing happened on the way to the marathon. I discovered the ultra trail marathon.

Originally as part of my training I decided to do a couple of 25k trail races just to keep things interesting and to my surprise discovered that I really, really like trail racing. My dabbling in 25k races lead to a 50k race that lead to a 50 miler.

Hey wait a second what happened to that marathon target race in the fall? Well it was still there and still is my target race. That said I found that I really peaked mentally after the Haliburton 50 Miler. I knew I had to focus on the marathon and physically was getting my training in but I felt strangely disconnected from my preparation. This is a very bad thing. I mean you can’t phone in a marathon. It's a long grueling race and a distance that has to be respected big time. You need to be focused, confident and ready. I actually began to consider maybe not doing it (I didn’t officially sign up until 2 weeks ago) but all that changed over the last 3 weeks.

The taper. I hate the taper, I really do. I should like it, less running, more rest and no sore legs. I have gotten to watch so much more TV lately. When the hell did they take Matlock off the air? This time around however the taper process helped me get reinvigorated and focused. I am as hyper and race ready as I have ever been for any race.

Thank you taper.
Let’s get this thing going.

PS. Good luck to my fellow blogging friends that are racing Hamilton tomorrow as well as to a pile of Longboat members that are running the full and half marathons.

Also a special good luck to Longboater Rob Campbell who is probably eating a big plate of pasta right now in a restaurant on Manhattan Island. Have fun running the NYC marathon tomorrow dude. I am sure it will pale in comparison to Hamilton.