Race Time

It's time. There's about 40 hours until I start my 15th marathon. I've gotten nervous before each one. This is no different. There's always the phantom injuries, the sluggishness, irritability, then the doubts. My guess is it's always the fear of failure, not so much of running slowly but not reacting well if/when things go bad.

There's no prediction for this one. I'm relatively healthy. My Achilles isn't perfect but it's probably as good as it's been in over a year. My fitness is pretty good. I'm a bit wary of my endurance because I haven't been able to run as much during this training cycle. But in the end, it's whatever the day brings. I'll see how I feel at the start, and go from there. It might be a 7:30 pace feels good, could be 7:15. We'll see. I'm tempted to play it conservatively because of the weather forecast: sunny and high of 65. It shouldn't be that warm during the morning, but warmer than I'd like. Considering I've been carted off to the hospital twice from dehydration, I'm going to be careful, even though the local hospital is the title sponsor. Time to face the pigdog again.