Lukes half

I had an out of body experience this weekend.

I went to Houston to run the Luke’s Locker half-marathon. I’ve done it the last three years; it’s a great race. It is also good training since it’s run on the Houston marathon course.

My Boston qualifying time is 3:20, so I was hoping to do a 1:40 (Boston pace for ½). I figured I had a 50/50 chance. The night before John said the weather forecast looked perfect, 50 degrees with 10mi/hr north wind. He asked if I would go full bore and try to run in the 1:38s. I replied that it would take a 100% race effort and that would interrupt my current training cycle because of the post-race recovery time I would need. I said I would be trilled with a 1:39:30.

The weather was perfect. At gun time, my GPS watch wasn’t picking up a signal. I decided to just run on feel and try to catch the time-clock splits every 5K. I went out fast; at the 5k split I was on a 10k (6.2 miles) race pace, not half marathon (13.2 miles). I said what the hell and just let it ride. At the 10k marker my time was a new personal 10k record, but the race wasn’t even half way over.

At mile eight I was on a 1:35 pace, I kept thinking that I should implode any minute. At mile 10, it became surreal; I was on a pace literally unimaginable just the night before. I opened it up the last mile. In the second half of the race, I set another 10k record (ran a negative split-averaged 7.00 min/mile pace last 10k).

I finished in 1:33.43 and placed 134 out of 2,200 finishers. Again, my Boston qualifying time is 3:20. If you double my half-marathon results, you get a 3:07 marathon pace. Of course you can’t do that.

However, there is a runners’ formula that can take your half-marathon race result and predict the time you will most likely run in a marathon. My friend John ran my 1:33.42 result through, and it returned a 3:15 marathon.

So I am obviously in condition to qualify for Boston (and then some). Additionally, I still have 10 more weeks of training in this cycle. Hopefully the weather is good come mid-January.