Goodbye Austin Marathon, Hello Surfside Beach Marathon
It's with a little disappointment that I'm leaving the Austin Marathon behind. I had to realize that I just can't coordinate all that I'm planning for, in terms of medical team media materials and alike, and then run 26.2 miles at the same time. It might be that I have others take over most, if not all, of the race-day activities. And if that's the case, then I'll run but just in case I have a Plan B. Plan B will consist of running the Surfside Beach Marathon, which I already registered for as it was filling up and had only 80 slots left.
The Surfside Beach Marathon is the only marathon and half-marathon in the U.S. run entirely on a beach! That means it could be the most wise decision of my running career or the most stupid. I looked at photographs from previous events to see if the sand was hard-packed or not and it was. I also read other runners feedback on hard-pack sand running and it was complimentary. So will it give my knees a break, compared to asphalt and concrete? Will it cause other muscles to compensate and cause fatigue? Who knows? I plan to go down and do a test with various pairs of shoes. It may be that the Nike Free is the way to go.
Training has been going well. I haven't posted daily about it because I hate to get on here every day and say, "The run was good, legs felt good, yada, yada, bling blang." The program I have is making me faster as I reached 7:01 minute miles last night for the five-mile speed workout. The 20-mile run last weekend felt like crap once I reached the 17th mile but that could be from a lack of nutrients, but more likely that I need to do it a lot more to get the body to adapt to the distance. There's another 20-miler for this weekend and the weather will be cold...maybe around 30 degrees. This week I'll take some food with me to simulate what'll happen on race day and then see how I feel.
I ran with tunes last weekend and may leave them at home this week for the long run. I felt with everything I had I was loaded down and I don't like that feeling. I found my mantra doesn't work well when music is blaring. It didn't work well after turning the music off either. maybe I'd listened to too much music. Music gets me through some workouts and I tend to like it for hills or speed workouts, but the long run it didn't apply. I think because the long run is slow and the music I have on the player is at a high number of beats per second.
My training group finished their race last Saturday night. About 60-70 showed up for the pre-race warmup and a little smack talk between the teams. Although our team clearly should've won the trophy with three-times as many people as the other hospital, the trophy is sitting in a neutral office until the results can be verified. There were way too many people signed up, the person singing the national anthem forgot the words, it was too hot but the Trail of Lights were fabulous, the margs afterwards were tasty and my running students were great! The next round of 10K training starts Jan. 7 and the 5K training in Feb. I got spoiled with two other coaches helping me out this session. For the spring session the program will go back to a single coach per 10 or 20 people.
Labels: ATT Austin Marathon, Nike Free, Surfside Beach Marathon, Trail of Lights
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