Wednesday, May 14, 2008

ALLURE

I’ve been thinking about the allure of the marathon lately. You know, why it seems like we’re always planning our training around this one or that one. I can’t remember the last time I trained, specifically, for a season of shorter races. Or maybe I should skip a spring marathon and focus on shorter races earlier in the year before gearing up for a fall marathon. I’m not positive, but it seems like always training for a spring and fall marathon can take away some of the speed and enjoyment that can come from mixing things up at shorter distances.

Maybe having a soft marathon PR, relative to my other PRs, makes me want to continue pursuing them.

And I was listening to a Runnerville podcast the other day and they were speculating about when Kara Goucher and Shalane Flanagan would move to the marathon. They were talking as if it were required that they move up to the event. Why is that? Can’t they focus on shorter events without having to run the marathon? Granted they’d probably be better off, financially, due to the higher appearance fees surrounding marathons. But who’s to say they wouldn’t be better off in other ways, by not running a marathon?

I came “this close” to going back to bed this morning. But then I figured I wouldn’t be able to run tonight and a zero in the logbook would make this a cutback week. I’d rather get in one more week of higher mileage before cutting back. So I laced them up and got in a nice 11 mile trail run.

A local TV station had this survey on their website yesterday;

What’s a bigger deal?

Indy 500
190 votes – 17.4%

Kentucky Derby
275 votes – 25.3%

Daytona 500
546 votes – 50.1%

Boston Marathon
78 votes – 7.2%
Quick update on the Runner’s Cookbook, I don’t remember seeing it when I ordered, but now you can view the Table of Contents. It’s nice to see that the Minnesota runners are well represented. You can guarantee that I’ll be checking Grandma D’s Goulash.

Quote of the day;

“Assuming the cookbook does print properly at some point, I'll consider this project my biggest accomplishment of my life thus far. I have never taken on such a big project.” – Alison Wade
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1 comment:

  1. Anonymous5/14/2008 1:37 PM

    I agree that sometimes it would be nice to focus on the shorter distances. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the marathon is what gets the attention of the media and non-runners. If you are talking to a non-runner and tell them you just ran a 35 min 10k they would probably not respond much but if you told them you ran a 4 hour marathon they would probably say great job and tell you it was a great accomplishment. So maybe the fact that we get that positive feedback pushes runners to the marathon. Great post by the way!

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