Race Goals for Mannheim Marathon
I went for a short 5-mile recovery run last night. I really don’t need a recovery run after a half-marathon, but the run was unscheduled, I hadn’t planned on running the day after the race. My excuse is the weather, it was 83F and just plain beautiful – blue, sunny sky, no wind – I kept the pace down, around marathon tempo, and felt great afterward!
Speaking of marathon, the Mannheim marathon is just around the corner, in 10 days to be exact. I plan on using this for a training run for the 50-mile race coming up five weeks after the marathon. The problem is that I am feeling in pretty good shape for the race and find myself tempted to try to speed up things a little in hopes of breaking my standing 4:14 PR.
On the other side I know that if I push too much I will need an extra week or two to recovery and could jeopardize having a good 50-mile race. I guess I’ll just wait and see how the weather is on race day and how I’m feeling. If everything falls into place on race day I’ll let up on the brakes and see what happens.
With that in mind I have set my race goals:
Bad day: Break my course PR of 5:10:56 (my first marathon in 2005)
Good day: Finish under 4:30
Race of my life: Finish under 4:14:13 for a new PR