Now that we’ve moved into our final stretch of training, we implicitly know we can finish a marathon and perhaps even in the time we’ve been training for. But when race day comes along, you can expect a whole barrel of surprises….
Although we’ve been training together, we are off to different races such that of my 5 or six regular training buddies, only two are also going to Victoria. And since a marathon is ultimately your own race, a pact to stick together “no matter what” is unfair when we have disparate abilities. I’m facing the reality of being reasonably ditched by the people I know because we are all going for personal bests. This is when mental fortitude is either your best ally or worst enemy.
One of the women suggested breaking a marathon down into 4 (10K) Sun Runs and I can see the thought process as following –
* 1st Sun Run: We’ll run together. We’re full of energy and refraining from bursting into a true 10K pace.
* 2nd Sun Run: We’ve all done half-marathon races and even ran eleven half-marathons (20+ KM) in 11 weeks of training. Easy-peasy.
* 3rd Sun Run: A tougher stretch but we’ve done it before in training. Further, we all started to train for a full marathon because, simply, a half-marathon is not enough.
* 4th Sun Run: At this point things really suck and 30K is around the point people bonk/hit the wall and despite the training someone’s gonna bonk. But it’s just one more Sun Run. We knock off 10Ks every Wednesday evening as a matter of training. It’s just one more hour.
I’ll tell you after the race how well this mindset fared….
Well it took a lot of mind set to comprehend all that running!
I heard of breaking down a marathon into 4 10k’s, but I prefer the more truthful approach ->
The marathon doesn’t start until mile 20.
If you can run the ‘4th’ quarter in an hour, that would be AWESOME.
Note that the 4th quarter is 12.2km.
Try not to think of raceday as a barrel of surprises, but as another training session. Don’t do anything differently – TRUST in your training.
Good luck,
Henry
For me, hehe, the 12.2K takes over an hour but, yes, if I can keep my 6:04 (minute-kilometer) in the 4th quarter, that is Awesome.
I’ve heard that saying “Trust your Training.” Yes, that is one of the thoughts getting me through – that I’ve followed a time-tested schedule (which ressembles other time-tested schedules), trained for 18 weeks – this is the *utmost* training I’ve done for a race! That *has* to amount to something….!