Marathon Build

Trail miles with my dog Penny

This time around I will be building for a race that I have been looking at for a long time: The Boston Marathon!
It is on every runners bucket list and it is no easy feat to get qualified for it. It ends up being a qualification time with a marathon (for me under 3:05) in the previous two years. Also, it might be a lottery for the spots due to the quantity of runners applying to go. This year it was around 5 minutes below qualification time was cut-off for the lottery. I was officially coming in with 2:59:20 from the BMO Marathon in Vancouver last May where I exploded in dramatic fashion at 32km and needed 10 km of serious soul sucking miles to drag my butt to the finish line.

It's actually happening! Boston 2020

After that experience (and a few others not too different) I decided it was time to make a priority on my goals and get some guidance on what would be ideal training (for my current state in life and limited training time). With that I employed the services of Jim Finlayson, the legendary runner out of Victoria that has been and still is a top distance runner in the region and now my coach (along with the recent addition of Cam Levins as the current Canadian record holder in the marathon at 2:09:25)

The training boils down to mainly two workout sessions per week and one long run.  There are a few recovery runs between days but nothing significant. I have mostly been able to complete the training as planned.... and that is the single biggest thing I feel will contribute to my success at the marathon. Putting in the training. A non-negotiable time 2-3x/week to conplete it. I feel in the past I have easily (too-easily!) modifided or dropped a workout due to weather or other issues.

Obviously there are still some higher priority things that still moves my training workouts, like kids and work emergencies, but not all the other "things" that I used to think would need a workout changed.

The other good part of this training is my tracked training with my new Garmin smart watch Forerunner 245 that has most of the techy nerd tools to track training. Along with premium strava app that tracks fitness over time, I'm 963% better than where I was at 6 months ago training for a similar timing marathon.

I feel good. I do, however, have no idea how this big race three months from now will go. I know there is lots of work to do but I'm motivated to build towards this and see how far I can get... Isn't that the reason for most things?