Estimating your time

Man that reverse taper really plays trick on my mind... with all this free time, I'm finding myself dissecting my past training and performance. Not that I'm unhappy with it but I'm reading everywhere about how you can be leading to a race and start thinking about what goal you want to accomplish.

I've never made a secret that when I started thinking about doing a marathon, 5 hours was what I was shooting for. Then I ran with the marathon group in the spring and was keeping pace with the 4:15 group, only to all apart when they did their race pace LOL  Chatting with the summer coach at one of the weekly runs, he told me that I could indeed shoot for a 4:30 goal time.

Once we did our time trial, I did 1:01 for a 10k and this was a struggle as it was hooooot and humid. So I did my training with the 4:30 group. Heat/humidity not helping, my training was challenging. I love cooler weather. I'm a cold weather runner...

My race was 4:51 and change... I had to do a pit stop and walked A LOT between the 34k and 39k mark. While it was difficult, it was never the death march I had feared. My training was right. Using the trusted McMillan Pace Calculator, my best 10k race (in ideal conditions, i.e. cooooold) at 57:54 predicted a 4:30 marathon while a 1:01 10k race predicted a more reasonable time of 4:45. If you take the pitstop and the extended walk breaks in consideration, I was pretty much on target for my fitness/running level.

This made me feel a lot better. I had been wondering, based on what I had heard and how quickly my legs recovered (although I might sign a different tune tomorrow evening when I head out for my first run), if I hadn't raced my first race a little too easy... so nope, I did it just the way my body could take it to allow for a good recovery.

Next test is in a few weeks. I decided to run Scotiabank, probably the half marathon. A friend gave me his entry so I'll be running as "Princess"  LOL  seriously, the entry will be transferred to my name but his bib is probably being printed so I'll have to print something to put on top of it.

Meanwhile, it's back to some kind of normal routine. Spin class tonight, followed by hot yoga.