Marathon Reflections

It's been a few days since the Lake Wobegon Trail Marathon and since I haven't been doing a lot of running I've had time to reflect on how my training went, how the race went, and what I want to do next. 

I thought my training went pretty well. The Hudson philosophy seemed like a good fit for me and I certainly structured my workouts in a more coherent manner than I did for the Twin Cities Marathon. The multi-paced long runs in the early part of training and the amount of threshold training I think were really helpful. 

The main thing I would do different is try to get in more runs over 18 miles. I missed one 20 mile run with a little injury and then cut an 18 mile run to 17 because of the same injury. That sent my total of 18 mile runs from 7 to 5. Training for my next marathon I'd like to put in 10 or so runs over 18 miles.

As far as the marathon itself I was generally happy with how it went. I slowed down a fair amount in the last 4 miles, and if I had been able to keep my pace I would have broke three hours. Afterwards I felt like if I had been a little more mentally tough I could've kept a better pace the last few miles. However, that's easy to think now when I'm not in the midst of running a marathon. I maybe had a shot at breaking 3 hours but like I said on my race report, I was likely within a minute or so of what I was capable of--I suppose I should be pretty happy with a 14 minute PR at 3:02.

For this summer and early fall I'm going to focus on speed at shorter races. I think it'll help me overall if I work on my speed. My marathon fitness should carry on to this summer and I should be able to put up some decent times between 5k and 10k.

Today was my first run after the marathon although I also played basketball yesterday. I'm feeling pretty good. In fact, I'm feeling 100 times better than I felt after the Twin Cities Marathon. No walking down stairs backwards after this race.