splits

This morning as I was drinking my coffee, I saw a post on the PFit forum about making a wristband with your marathon pace. It included a link to an application on Marathon Guide that created a very elegant wristband -- but of course, that wristband doesn't take into account the St. John's Bridge at mile 17.

So I decided to find the splits generator at the Portland Marathon site, which isn't as pretty as Marathon Guide's, but would be more realistic. The link is really hard to find. On it, it has you enter your goal time and three recent race performances.

The rule of thumb I've heard of is twice your half-marathon pace plus 10 or 15 minutes. This puts me at a little over 8 hours, which I just can't bear. So I decided to put in the unrealistic goal of 7 hours 45 minutes. I entered a couple three race times, and hit the submit form button, and it came up with the goal times, and the predicted times. I fully expected the predicted times to be, well, at least 15 minutes later than the goal times--but in fact, it was 10 minutes earlier--7:35. By golly!

If I input the time for my 21 miler--7:25. Oh my gosh, that's way too good to be true. Of course, we will see what happens--and perhaps if I can manage to start out slowly, I can end fast. That's my goal.

I just want to go out and run around. I am going to look for an appropriate halloween costume for the dog and hope that wears me out a little.