Welcome

Nice workout. You ran the last set faster than the first is very telling. I starting to wonder if we will see a sub 2 hour 30K this saturday and a 2:45 marathon for Ogden.

Definitely sub 2 this Saturday. My goal is to break 1:58. I am praying one of the top three doesn't show - like Bryant who won a marathon last weekend. Then I end up in the money.

I will not get 2:45 in the marathon because I am not going to pace that aggressively. 1:25 or so for the first half and then see if I can negative split.

See you Saturday!

I got the inside scoop for ya...Bryant is for sure running Saturday, Brett is a 90-95% chance of being there, and I'm not sure on Steve.

Oh man. I was thinking Bryant was the best bet not to race two consecutive weekends. Oh well. I was looking back and I would have been top 3 the last 3 years. Tough group this year!

Yeah it's a tough group. You've done well though in the circuit and it'll pay off come Ogden.

Bryant is really fit and Saturday's marathon was basically just a typical "hard" Saturday run for him. He wasn't sore at all and went right back to regular training Monday. He even ran intervals with me yesterday. He'll be extremely tough to beat at Ogden Marathon.

Bryant will be tough but I am guessing it comes down to you two and whether you can hold it together in the last third.

Do you have an opinion on my strategy? I am still gaining fitness and I have room to improve, so I am not looking for an all out drop dead race. Rather it's another milestone on the path. The calculators put me somewhere between 2:43-2:48 but the marathon is a fickle beast and I don't want to push my luck.

You nailed it: "if you can hold it together in the last third" That is so true, I haven't been able to in a marathon yet. It's that and can I avoid a pit stop.

I like your strategy. Ogden should be a negative or at least even split course. The best downhill is in the 2nd half and most of the rollers are in the 1st half.

That being said I've never been able to be patient enough to allow my 1st half to be slower than I want my overall pace to be. It's a smart strategy but takes a lot of patience and self-discipline. I get too competitive and want a perfect day and try to force it too much. I also feel like I need to bank time early on in case I fade late, but in reality I'm likely fading late because I'm trying to bank early.

For some people the calculators are accurate, but for people like me that are more on the speed side of things rather than the endurance side, they always predict faster than I end up running.

Sorry for the long response but yeah I like your strategy of starting conservative. And if you feel good pick up that second half starting around 18 as you enter Ogden Canyon. One thing I'm learning more and more is that I run better when I don't set a time goal for my race but rather just go off of feel and effort. When I do that the time always seems to follow. But, when I try to force my splits for a certain pace/time I tend to have less successful races.

Thanks. It must be fun to race the competition rather than the watch. I get to do so sometimes, but I generally don't know who it will be until the race is happening.

I love how in the half last weekend Jake threw it down right out of the gate and then you reciprocated. You were then able to stretch the lead on the hilly portion and hang on after such an unpredictably fast first half.

For me, my pace is generally too erratic if I don't have a watch.

Oh I still race with a watch but try to avoid worrying about if the splits are where they "need" to be to hit a certain finish time. I still look at splits but try not to worry about them but rather focus on the effort I'm giving.

For example the three races this year that I've not worried about time and just ran hard and competed were St. George Half, SLCTC 10k, and SLC Half. I won all three and ran excellent times.

The two races I went hard for an optimistic goal were PHX full and Strider's half. I didn't win either and I fell short of my goals by a sizeable margin. At Strider's I kept trying to push hard at the start to hit low 5:00's or even high 4:50's (which didn't happen) and I just got sapped of energy by the second half. The pace felt hard at the start but I kept pushing it because it was the pace I "needed" for my goal time. In hindsight I should've relied on how it felt more than the splits and I think I would've been 30 seconds or so faster overall.

SLC half on the other hand felt ok early on even though the splits were sub-5:00. But I didn't let the fast splits scare me because the effort felt right.

I appreciate this dicussion, but I am sorry it is getting so long. It is helpful to talk these things out and I understand what you are saying.

I think you may be discussing good days and bad days in a way. You shouldn't waste a good day if you are feeling it and you shouldn't stubbornly stick to a script on the bad ones. Or the script was off to begin with...

The marathon is probably different where you can't really decide to push it early on because you are dealing with a finite amount of energy stores. That's why you race the final 10k only. Good luck to you!

Yeah it could be looked at as good days and bad days, but I think that you can make it a bad day by stubbornly sticking to a script early on when it feels harder than it should. It may not have always been fated to be a bad day but rather you ensured the day's fate by still pushing instead of trying to gradually build into pace.

The marathon is a different beast and I am not the best source of information for it as I haven't really run what I'd consider an A race yet at that distance.

And yeah this has gotten long but to wrap it up simply: you have the right idea in my mind by shooting for 1:25 and then hoping to negative split.

Think of it this way if you run 2:48 off of 1:25/1:23 and feel good at the end your confidence will be higher for your next marathon than if you run 1:23/1:25 and were holding on for dear life at the end.

This discussion has been good for me too, because I have always postive split my marathon and I need to learn to be more patient.

Agreed that a negative split can be a huge boost and a great lesson in patience.

Let's hope your knee holds up and I stay in one piece and then we'll see what we've learned.