Portland Interlude

Tomorrow, I'll get on a plane and arrive in Portland, OR, at 2:30pm.

Sunday, I'll get on a plane and leave Portland at 3:00pm.

What craziness is this? I'm running the Portland Marathon.

Primarily, I do not want to have 17 months pass between when I qualified for the Boston Marathon and when I run it. I hoped to run the New York marathon, but I did not have the luck of the lottery to get in, nor the sub-Boston qualifying time, so I chose Portland. It involves travel (but not too much), it has a decent reputation, and the timing is good.

Goal: 3:12.

I figure that since Portland is a harder course than CIM (well, most anything would be harder), I would be accomplishing something if I ran the same time, and with less training. [You may recall that I started training for CIM immediately after a three week recovery from San Francisco, and I trained pretty hard for it.] For this marathon, I would put in fewer miles and not be coming off the heels of another marathon.

My training has gone well. I ran the same program I followed for CIM, but I pared it back to 60 miles at peak instead of 65, and I didn't try to push myself so hard in the fifth week of my big surge. I have found in my marathon pace runs that I can hit the 7:15 pace that should serve me well for many miles and not feel completely taxed doing so. I did one such run where I ran 14 of 18 miles at that pace, including completing the hard-charge up the hills in Golden Gate Park, and met the pace throughout.

So now, two days before the race, I am feeling pretty confident that I'll have a good race, but I'm also not so concerned about performing well. Injury is the worst that can happen, not failing to meet this goal.

Watch my progress if you can! The race starts at 7am on Sunday.