Hope restored

Well, we're finally into taper week.

Over the last month since my last post my confidence has been up and down like a yo-yo, and I've considered a bunch of different race tactics.

The SMC a week ago and the long run the week before were dreadful. I ran 2:05 at SMC as a training run but it felt like a race, and the week before that I couldn't even manage a 19K run without long walk breaks. I don't know what was up with me, but it seemed to be falling apart.

But it seems to have come back together.

I intended to run the Coolrunning Challenge 5K as pacing practise at 5:12Ks, but buggered it up and ended up running pretty even 4:55s coming in at about 24:40. Then my friend sfGnome suggested I run back to the start with him at the correct pace. This we did, settling into 5:12 quickly, and I ran the 5K pretty comfortably.

Then on Sunday I belted out a 16.3K long run, and most of the time I had to slow myself down; I did it at around 6:00 per K. It felt great.

The other significant thing I have done in the last month is to trim down from 80 to 75Kg. This alone, I believe, should give me a couple of minutes over the 21.1K.

So I go into the race with hope. I'm still not confident - I'll have to have things go my way, but I reckon if I can hit the right pace and stick to it, and conditions are favourable I can come home in 1:50. I'll be running with Nite_time_runner - another aspiring 1:50 runner.

So just a couple of short sharp runs left. Standby for the race report.