T-27: I See the Light at the End of the Tunnel

First off, I'd like to give a shout out to my buddy Dara who is, at this very moment, running her first marathon. She's in New York about 3/4 of the way done, and she's kicking ass so far. I can't wait to talk to her afterwards to see how she feels.

Anyway, I'm going to run my own marathon in 27 days. WOW!!! It really snuck up on me. All of the sudden I'm 4 weeks out. The good news is that I'm as confident as ever that I'm going to destroy my PR of 3:57. Here's my training update:

After my 11 mile LT run Thursday, I went to work as usual. Around noon, I started to feel sick, like I was getting a cold. By the end of the day my nose was running like crazy and I was dizzy and clammy. I felt like shit. I thought that maybe I'd over trained, which worried the hell out of me. I decided to take Friday off from cross-training, and just rest. I took it very easy yesterday (except for last night when I played a rock show), and I drank lots of water and made sure I ate plenty. This morning I woke up with an extra hour of sleep in me, thanks to daylight savings, and I was ready for 15 miles.

The plan was to run an 8:10 pace. I felt good about this since it's pretty close to my marathon pace. I really wanted to make a conscious effort to keep my pace down today so I could run the 15 miles without burning out, and feel good for my last week of hard training before the taper.

Me and the girlfriend started off nice an slow, the first mile was 8:18. The second was 8:04.

Now, normally at this point I would have said, "8:04... that's great, let's stick with that." But, today I was smart, and we slowed down. We managed to run a pretty consistent pace, with a few 8:00's and a few 8:20's thrown in. I just tried to keep my legs moving at a pace that felt pretty easy for me. I wanted to feel like I was holding back on the throttle, and that I could just burst out at any moment.

The run was pretty easy, to be honest, and at the end I checked my GPS.

My overall pace was 8:08... almost exactly where it needed to be. I felt like I could have easily kept that pace up for a while.

This week is really it as far as the really tough training goes. Next Sunday is my last 20 miler, and then it's time to taper. Tapering isn't about relaxing and taking it easy, but it's more about maintaining the level of fitness I've built up over the past few months, and maybe losing another pound or two to make December 2nd as easy as it can be (which isn't all that easy.)

I can see the end of this thing now, and I'm running stronger than I've ever thought possible, so I'm REALLY curious to see what happens in 27 days.