Monday, November 19, 2007

Middle-of-the-night thoughts on running

Well, I really did go to sleep around 8:30, I was knackered, only the trouble is I woke up quite thoroughly at 3 and cannot go back to sleep! Arghhh, it really is too early to get up, I could use another three hours of sleep or so--not to mention I do not have any milk in the house for coffee...

1. Don't worry, I'm not having self-discontent, but I am having a strong feeling that I could have run a bit faster today! Not astronomically faster, but I was holding back pretty hard through the whole middle six miles or so of the run--I could have relaxed into it a bit more, and I am pretty sure I could have sustained an 8:30 pace. Interesting--it will just take a while before I am a more experienced racer...

2. Philadelphia is going to be the ideal place for me to do my first marathon. There were noticeably fewer spectators this year than last, because of the earlier start time, and it is also a course that some people complain about because the spectators are concentrated so heavily in the first half of the race and then at the very end, but there's a long stretch in miles, oh, 13-20 that is very sparsely populated indeed. I like this. Spectators are nice, there were some funny ones (two very tiny kids for instance holding up hands for high-fives on the bridge leading up to Penn, they looked thrilled when I swiped 'em, it was hilarious!), but really I prefer to dig in and concentrate on what I'm doing without all the distraction...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It's nice that you had some fun with a few spectators.

Experience is a valuable teacher --especially for those of us who can tend to overthink.