Back to Philly - Marathon #11

A relatively quiet day on the blogging front after a week of lots of fun, exciting post Yonkers Half Marathon excitement. I am excited that Teens Run Yonkers Board Members have decided to start a bit of a campaign to increase both awareness of the program and raise donations. Over the next two weeks, they will be highlighting our activities and asking for contributions as we begin our new season. I'll be doing that myself as well but will reserve that for my facebook post. Nevertheless, very cool and eager to see how that goes...

The other news for me on the more personal - but still running - front is that yesterday, I signed up for my 11th Marathon - doing the full Philadelphia Marathon for the 3rd time and am determined to be in the high fours (a.k.a. sub 5). Remember, I never said I was fast - just consistent. I don't know what it is - the fact that Philly is my hometown, that it was where I did my first half, the course - who knows. Nevertheless, I just like that marathon. I think it's kind of a good barometer for my progress too.

Philly was the 2nd full marathon I completed back in 2008 (there was another 20+ pounds of me then too)and it took me 6+ hours. Last year, I was pretty close- I did it in 5:10. According to Runners World, if I follow their smart coach training, I should be able to do it in 4:50 based on my most recent race times. So, I'm going to make a really determined and conscious effort to follow their training schedule - which has me doing my first long run at 12:39. Like I said, I'm not fast but it's almost harder to do it that slow than to try to do it fast. But I'm really going to try to follow it in a focused and disciplined way - more than I usually do anyway.

I think there must be some element of luck involved as well. I had been thinking about signing up for a few weeks and was kind of figuring on going on the site "one of these days". I was meeting with an amazing person who had done similar work to TRY in Philly this past Wednesday and she told me that the race was entirely sold out. This motivated me to go on the site and it turned out that the Half Marathon was in fact completely sold out! At the same time, there was 1,000 spots left for the full so I immediately signed up. Definitely feels good to be right back to training for another one! Will keep you all posted on my training progress