INDEPENDENCE DAY HALF MARATHON RACE PREVIEW

Pretty good reason to miss my only run so far (midweek 6
miler. Beavers 2018 baseball champs!

Has it really been almost a month since my last blog post? Oh my word! A quick update before I get into the race tomorrow... everything is going well with the marathon training! Still sticking to my training schedule and hitting all the long runs. Body feels good, no complaints there. Really an optimal training cycle so far! A long ways to go yet, but I am feeling pretty positive. Long runs have ventured into the "actually long" territory, I've now ran 16 twice and will run 18 next week, but they are going easily enough except for the "holy crap it's been forever are we done yet?" mental challenge. Physically they feel fine!

And with that, let's get into the race tomorrow. I signed up for this one a while back when I was looking to sprinkle in some races throughout the training cycle to keep things interesting and keep me on my toes. Now, a race always sounds better in theory (like a 5:30am plane flight), and then when it's actually race day you're like "why am I doing this?" Well, why I voluntarily chose to wake up at 7am on a holiday I'll never know! At least all the hot dogs and beer afterward will be guilt free. I think I'll enjoy the race as it should have some nice scenery and a good atmosphere. Just not all that excited about running it at race pace!

However, I do want to run it to the best of my abilities just to see how I stack up. I could always just 9:30/mile it and enjoy it, but that wouldn't really tell me anything. Now, I'm not going to enter this race 100% just because I didn't taper properly before it. I ran 16 on Saturday and then 4 miles last night. Not too bad and I did cut back on the Monday miles, but ideally I would give my legs a couple days rest before really attacking a race. So while I might not be able to achieve my best possible time given my current fitness, I think I should be able to get relatively close.

When I was in Omaha last week I did what ended up being a half race pace tempo run for five miles. It was mostly motivated by the traffic whizzing by me on the highway at 55mph and a fear for my life (pedestrian infrastructure over there is garbage), but I was able to hit 8:15-8:20s pretty easily. For being 82 degrees and humid outside the run was surprisingly easy. I just hope it feels that easy come tomorrow morning! On Monday I went out for an easy four miles as part of a mini taper and 9:45s were kicking my ass. So it's hard to predict how I am going to feel on race day!

Course map for tomorrow. Let's get loopy!

The weather looks a bit warm, 68 when the race starts and around 76 when I'll finish. It should be overcast though, so that will help. Not the ideal temperature, but nothing too tragic either. It can be a lot worse in the summer. If the sun does break through I'm also fairly certain a lot of the course has shade, so that shouldn't be an issue. The course itself is two loops, the first loop being a 10k, and then the second loop being that same loop plus an extended out and back to hit our mileage.  It's also pretty dang flat. So overall, while my legs aren't super fresh and the temperature is a bit warm, it should be a pretty quick race for me assuming I can find a groove.

Overall, I'm not going to do the usual A, B, and C goals, as this isn't a "target" race, more of just a "check up." I will tell you that I hope to beat my Corvallis time. Now, that race went amazing... one of those runs where everything clicked and you are certain you performed to the best of your abilities. I'm not sure how this one will go, so we'll see. I'm not going to be disappointed if I don't beat Corvallis as long as I give it my best try. However, it would be pretty sweet to beat that time given how well that race went! I'll need to go sub 8:30 to do that, so I'll probably target 8:20s and hope I can hold on.