Monday, February 11, 2008

Germany: Marathon. March 27, 2004

Tomorrow morning in the Freiburg marathon. I'll be running half of it (that is, a half marathon). That's a total of 21 kilometers, better known as 13.1 miles.

I kinda decided to sign up on a whim. My goal is 1:45. That's 105 minutes. Divide that by 21 kilometers, that's a kilometer every 5 minutes. Multiply by 1.6, and we get a mile every 8 minutes.

We'll see what happens. I'll probably hurt myself:-)

I'd like to comment, whoever put the marathon on the night that you loose an hour sleep? Are they crazy?
The time change happens a week earlier here in Europe, so there will be a 7 hour difference!

Not only does that mean we have to wake up early, it also means we have to run in freezing cold weather.

Well, I ran the half marathon. My total time, according to my stop-wa tch (that is, non-offcial) was 1:59:38. Pretty wimpy. However, I did a bsolutely no training for the marathon. The only thing that might coun t as training would certainly not have trained me. The day before the marathon I ran 7 kilometers (the half marathon is 21 kilometers). If I had done that on Wednesday, it might have been training, but nothing you do the day before will have a positive effect on the next day - on ly negative (as you'll still be sore).

I used my stop-watch to measure how long it took to do each 3-kilomet er stretch. My goal was 15 minutes per stretch (1:45 total), but here are the real results:
15:07
15:59
15:56
18:05
17:09
17:17
20:03 (yeah, I didn't get a second-wind at the end).

Of course, there were other factors leading to my poor performance. I didn't eat dinner the day before or breakfast the day of (ever since I got really sick in July/August 2002, sometimes my hunger will disapp ear. Sometimes for a day, sometimes for a couple weeks, and I'll drop down to a meal a day). The marathon solved my hunger problem:-)

But it was fun. It was the first marathon in Freiburg. I ran in it. Ha.

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