Day 184 Another Marathon
I had a very good run on Tuesday night with a club member. Normally, I run very slow with the group. Last Tuesday, it was supposed to be wet and cold and many runners didn’t come out. It was me and another guy, Brian, running. There were a few ladies as well. Brian and I took off and we ran together. Brian gave me my money worth. I was out of breath after two miles. Somehow I was able to hang on till the end.
He commented I must be slower due to having just ran the Baltimore Marathon, but that was no excuses. He said normally people couldn’t even walk and less so running.
I have been mentally preparing for the coming Sunday Marine Corps Marathon. I haven’t been this excited for a race! Stressing on the mental part not physically. It is too late to do any last minute run. I could eat better and sleep earlier, to make sure my body get plenty of rest, that about it.
I will be doing the Ultra – 50K! I am using my last Marine Corps Marathon time as bench mark. Last time my pace was 11:16 (7 min/km). This time I will be aiming for 6 hr finish on a 31 miles course, and so the pace will be a little slower at 11:36 (7:15 min/km).
One concern for the ultra runners, even with a 25 mins head start will be running among the marathon people by the 4.5 mile split (we will have our own out-and back of a 4.8 miles at the 4.5 mile mark) and we will be ended up at the back of the marathon crowd once we rejoin back at the course. Someone from the marathon pacing community setup an excel spreadsheet of the pacing/crowd scenario, and I have been playing around with their numbers. It take the slower runners about an hour to get to the 4.5 mile split. It will take me more than 1:25 (hr:min) to clear the 9.4 miles (even with the 25 mins head start). Basically, I will be end up at the tail end of the marathon group when I rejoin the normal marathon course. I ran the simulation of various pace between 9 min-mile to 12.5 min-mile, I will still be caught in the tail end of those running the marathon.
We know there will be 20,000-25,000 runners. We ultra people (about 1700 of us) will be passing a lot of runners that day once we rejoin the course since we will came in running a min to two min mile faster pace than the crowd. Some are estimating, our pace group will pass about 6000 runners in the first few miles after rejoining the course. I think though probably about 1,000 runners, but we will pass maybe 5000-6000 by the time we get to the finish line. Some people don’t think we can actually run that fast with such big crowd in front of us.
I set up my own handy pacing spread sheet too. It will calculate my current pace and my needed pace to reach the end by certain time. It will be dynamic, meaning it can be continously update as I run. Math is Fun. This is where I am good at. I almost create an animation showing my speed vs the rest of runners.
Sorry to bore any of you with the math.
In awe 