New Half PR - well just barely!

It gets so fast and furious toward the end of the marathon training season that you just have to let somethings go, and my blog has been the worse for it. Sorry for anyone missing the postings...

Ran Grete's Great Gallop today and felt pretty good, until I realized that I DID make a personal best, but only by a matter of seconds. It's exactly like you said, I need much more speed training if I want to run faster. Nevertheless, I'm feeling strong and ready for the Big Day. My
diet is much more under control, and allowing for less screw-ups (they didn't have a bib for me, and the subway was running local, which meant that I didn't get any real warm up - I did run from the Subway to the start - you have to understand that I left MORE than an hour to get
there and would have made it there faster running, seriously). Oh well.

Total time (unofficial of course - 1:43.16 which is certainly 2 seconds or so slow. Brooklyn's official time is 1:43.23! And that's with a high 8 and a 9 minute mile on the last two.)

Mile Pace (more or less)
1 8:25
2 8:05
3 - 10 7:45 (with one 7:41 on mile 4)
11 8:05
12 7:44
13 7:44
finish

super consistent - but my sense is that there's no way to run 7:45 during the marathon, it's too fast for me. Never mind that. I read that you take your recent half time and double it and then add 10 to 15 mins to predict your race pace. That would put me right on somewhere
between 3:40 - 3:45 which would be incredible if I could do it, I would be
overwhelmed with excitement.
(one of the reasons I went out so hard today was to test my race pace training - it was something of a long tempo run really).

Gear worked great. Water stops were fine (I didn't take my final gel pack fuel as I was focused on the finish, and I notice that I slow down about 5 seconds when I eat those, even though I'm still running through).

No walk breaks, nothing unusual, just good solid running today.
Was a bit humid though.

A final thought, because of my bib (later in the pack than usual) I ran with the yahoos at the back - this combined with my actually pretty impressive pace given the traffic meant that I passed everyone - I think that only 10 people passed me the whole time and I past at least one of
them, short guy with a blue shirt and grey shorts, in the end. Maybe more people passed me, but I didn't notice. It is much, much better to be the passer than the passed. Given the way that I feel both physically and emotionally, I wouldn't trade this result with the one from Brooklyn any day. Still that was a very impressive run on basically zero training - amazing. But it's better to be in a position to pass folks rather than feel like they are flying by.

Next weekend is Staten Island and then we're beginning the giant taper.
I will run Staten Island with a fast Frenchman that I know - should end spot on 8 min miles or just a bit higher. Might be a repeat of this race or even faster? Bring it on!

Official Line:

Grete's Great Gallop
October 3, 2009 Parks, Joshua M36 Brooklyn, NY

Distance: 13.1 Time Net 1:43:15
Time Pace/ Mile 7:52
Overall Place 755
Gender Place 601
Age Place 137
Age-Graded % 58.0 %