Year 2, Week 12 Wrapup

Still eating a ton this week, but my weight has almost plateaued at 178. I ran about 27.5 miles this week, so I'm back up to speed there.

On Thursday, I met up with a local workout group. They call themselves The Workout Group. They're a running group who train twice a week to get faster. On that particular day, there had been heavy rains, so they scrapped the drills they had been planning on the field, and just did 1/4 mile intervals on the running path around Reid Park. There were people of all levels there, but the main pack was keeping about a 6:45 pace in the intervals. That was just a little too fast for me, but I averaged between 7:00 and 7:15 on the intervals and caught up with them on the recovery. There were a couple of dozen people there, and it seemed like a fun group. I think going regularly would definitely help me get faster. I just don't know if I want to commit to having to be there at a regular time or anything.

I've done a lot of thinking this week about my goals for running, and I'm at a bit of a crossroads. On the one hand, I don't really want to be a runner anymore. It takes a lot of time (8-10 hours per week) that I could really be using for other things. On the other hand, if I quit running now, I would probably never get back into it, and then I would get mad at myself later in my life for not doing more with my good running ability when I had the chance.

On top of all that is the realization that I need some form of exercise, and there's no other form of exercise that I would want to do or be able to do more than running. If I gave up on competitive running entirely and just ran 4 hours per week for fitness, I would have a hard time going out to run at all. Training for specific goals is what actually forces me out the door, and not having those goals would make it next to impossible to motivate me to actually do it. Try as I might, I just can't envision myself as one of those guys that just gets up and jogs the same few miles every morning.

So, I'm thinking I can't quit now, because I haven't done everything I might want to have done. It's not like I have a bunch more that I want to do; it's more like I'm afriad of quitting, and then identifying something I wanted to have done. I think that I'll have to identify all the goals I might ever have, then preemptively beat them so that I can feel free to quit sometime.

I'm coming to the realization that I'm going to have to go to Boston. If I don't, I'll regret it. If I do, I'll probably feel like I have done enough and could safely quit. So, it's all coming down to that. The 2010 race is already full, of course, and the 2011 race would fill up by December 2010. So, if I could somehow qualify by December 2010, that would give me 22 months to work up to the right speed. Seems doable, but still really hard, since that's less than 2 years away, and would require me to maintain a 7:27 pace for 26.2 miles (when the longest I've ever gone at that pace was the 5k a couple weeks ago.

So Boston's probably going to have to be the big goal, but there may be a couple of others that I feel like I might have to beat. For one, I'd really like to do a sub-20 minute 5k. I'd also like to win a race at some point. That one's more of an issue of planning than of training, though. If I really search around and find the right combination of small race and weak field, even a 20 minute time can be a winning one.