Left Arm Bandit

All Right! I finished my first 1/2 Marathon post accident on Sunday in a time of 2:04:48. That's a 9:28 pace!

13.1 Marathon

The course was brutal. 3 big hills and the last one came at one mile to go. The hill was over 1/2 a mile and climbs 150 feet in 1/4 mile and then levels off some to climb an additional 75 feet in the second 1/4 mile. It is just brutal. Here's the course map.

Thanks to Matt, Drew, and my Mom and Dad for coming out to cheer me on. They took a few pictures of me as I drug myself across the finish line. These ones are Matt's. I'm still waiting to get the other ones. All in all the result is that I'm excited/ scared for the Portland Marathon in just 10 short weeks. I've got to keep up with the training. This week is a step back week so I'm only running 26 miles which should be a nice change.

So, You know that skill we all learned when were were in kindergarten or even earlier. two comes after one, three after two four after three and so forth? Well apparently I think that it goes one, two, three, five, six ... nine, eleven, twelve.

This weekend I was scheduled to run twelve miles. Due to circumstances, some in my control some out of it I was unable to run Saturday morning like I had planed. So I decided to flip flop my long run to Sunday and do the short 3.5 miler on Saturday.

Saturday's run was hot and not a lot of fun so I wasn't super psyched about Sunday. Well Sunday rolls around, I woke up a 6:30 to my house mate rummaging around in the kitchen. In my sleepy state I miss calculated the amount of time I had before church coming up with some crazy numbers and then when back to sleep for and hour.

This left me the afternoon/evening to run. It was in the 60's and the sun was baring down so I postponed to 8pm. On my run I counted my miles totally leaving out mile four and mile ten. I got back home thinking I had run about 13 miles going wow that was super fast. Much to my surprise after mapping my route I had only run 10.77.

Oh well next weekends long run is a 1/2 marathon race so I should be running the right distance. It'd be pretty hard to mess that on up.

Wow, so I am really ramping up my mileage and getting faster. Monday I ran just over 10 miles and today during lunch I did 7.3 miles at a 8:28 min per pile pace. I'm super stoked for the Lacamas Half Marathon coming up next Sunday.

There are two great web sites I've been using. If you are a runner, hiker, biker,etc and want to know how far, what elevation you are going check out this fantastic web site: www.mapmyrun.com. There are sister web sites, mapmyride, mapmyhike, etc. They all share the same data its just a different marketing.

The second web site is the McMillan Running Calculator available here: http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/mcmillanrunningcalculator.htm According to that site based on my 7 mile 8:28 time I should be able to run a 1:57:23 1/2 marathon and a 4:07:33 marathon. That seems a little fast but I guess we'll find out next Sunday.