VICTORIA 2008

I'm way behind on my blog, so let me see if I can get you up to date on a few items...

About 3 weeks ago we went to Victoria, British Columbia for the half marathon. Victoria's one of our favorite cities so we turned it into a short vacation, by taking the Clipper passenger ferry directly from Seattle and by extending our stay in Victoria to include the Monday after the race -- which happened to be Canadian Thanksgiving.

Neither Lorinda nor I ran our fastest half marathon times, but we both felt really good after the race.

I approached this half marathon with a new strategy: I decided to run it as if it were two events -- a 10 mile warmup, followed by a 5k tempo run. So, I hovered around the 8:20-8:25 minute per mile mark, and at mile 10 I kicked it up a notch and ran something like 7:20's to the end. It sure felt good to FINISH a half marathon strong like that. I've never been able to "pick off" people towards the end of a race, because I always feel like dog crap. Not this time. Ran across the finish line in 1:48 and felt totally fine. Probably could have run harder. But I am focusing on PACE more than anything these days. Slower is fine, as long as I'm even. If I learned ANYTHING from my horrible marathon earlier this year... It is that I need to pace properly. Working on that now.