Marathon strategy

11 days until my qualifying marathon.

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Here's my latest thinking on race strategy: I'm going to approach the race as four 10k chunks. Yes, I know a marathon is actually 42ish kilometers, but thinking about the race in 10k chunks makes sense to me.

In part, this occurred to me this past weekend as I attempted my last long run. I was running a slightly abreviated version of the 10k race loop in my town. My intial goal was to run this loop, 5.43 miles in length (shortened from 6.2 miles because I wanted to avoid a busy stretch of road), four times. I did the loop three times, but cut the fourth loop short as I was getting pretty sore. I put the soreness down to effort I'd exerted on the Dumyat hill race I'd run three days earlier, and thought that being a little short of my goal was better than killing my legs two weeks out from the marathon. So, I call it 18 miles on my last long run.

Four 10ks. The first I'm going to take slow. I know, I know, once you see everyone in their racing kit you start thinking - this is a race - I've got to keep up.

But I'm not going to do that for the first 10K. I'm going to try to stay in my head, and use the first 10k as a warm-up. If I'm feeling good after I can start picking it up a little bit.

The bottom line is that if I run 8 minute miles, I qualify for Boston.