ImageFall is well underway and that means the marathon bug has hit me again.  Even though I can’t seem to stop the continuous forward march of aging, it hasn’t yet reduced my desire for long distance running.  Last year at about this time, while Hurricane Sandy was finishing up the devastation she caused on the eastern seaboard, I was packing for what was to be the canceled New York City Marathon.   It took me nearly six months before I considered another long distance race but in August I did, in fact, commit to training for another marathon.  The Tucson Marathon on December 8th is the new goal.  My old Colorado training buddy has recently moved to Tucson so a marathon in the Southwest is a logical choice.  Since we’re planing to run the race together, there’s some built-in competitive incentive to keep the training up.

My intermediate training goal was to complete the City to the Sea Half Marathon in San Luis Obispo, California in early October.  Despite a rapid increase in training distances, the race was a success with a finish 10 minutes ahead of expected.  Even though I had some success in the race, I did nearly everything wrong in preparation.  I went from a six mile long run to a 1Image2 mile long run over a 4 week period.  I bought a new pair of running shoes the day before the race and ran the half marathon in them without ever running in them before.  I didn’t ingest any nutrition, gels or otherwise, during the race.  All bad things – and I knew it.  Fortunately it all worked out well despite myself – but that was a half marathon.  I can’t power my way through a full marathon without much more careful planning and execution.  The distance is too long and the effort is too hard to not be prepared.  It’s been 18 years since I ran the Chicago Marathon in 1995 and I’m a lot older now.  I should have much more experience behind me now and know how my body responds to the stress of training.  One of the things I plan to do is to keep at least half of my long run mileage on trails to reduce the impact of training on pavement.  In theory, this will serve me well.  We’ll see!

Stay tuned – I’ll write about how the training progresses and how the results of the preparation unfold.