That was great advice from my friend Paul Duckett (former YMCA downtown running group coach). He told me that several years ago when I first started running and it has kept me going through some tough runs. This morning's run was very tough. Six miles on the beach. I repeated that mantra, counted to 1000, prayed for clouds, bribed myself to just run to the lifeguard chair, etc etc...
I only ran 6 miles, but having slept in, had to run at 10 am. Geez, it was hot. I won't do that again! At first I was running into the wind, so I thought that I would have a nice tailwind coming back. NOPE. It was just hotter. But, I made it through - so another training run down, 10 weeks of them to go...
More and more, I find myself believing I can run a marathon. I hope I am right! This week's long run will be 16 miles. We start at 430 am. I am guessing it will take around 4 hours - with the frequent water breaks and bathroom stops. Last week's 14 mile run was 3 hours and 44 minutes with all the stops. We keep these runs on the slow side - with the heat.
I am starting to consider ( obsess) what sort of time I might be able to run the marathon in. In my dreams, I would do a sub 5 hour marathon. I can't even to begin to believe I could pull that off, though. My running mentor tells me that after Saturday's run, I should be able to calculate a pretty accurate estimate of what to expect. I will post about that this weekend.
Off to the beach...
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