Over the last month my marathon training has been hampered by a left foot injury that I initially thought was a stress fracture, and more recently by a tight right hamstring. Up until yesterday, I was even considering not doing this race, as I didn't want to injure myself any further. Considering this, I was quite pleased with the race, and set a 45 second PR.

The day was a great day for a race, with sunny skies and temperatures in the low 30's. The only real issue was the wind, which was 20-30 mph with higher gusts.

Over the past month I had to take 11 days off due to an injury to my left foot, so my fitness probably dropped a bit. I decided to start out around a 6:15-6:20 pace, and see how I felt. In my last HM my heart rate avg. was 172, so I was targeting that.

My first three miles were 6:13, 6:13, 6:18, but my HR had crept up to around 180, and I was running into a headwind. Over the next four miles I eased up a bit, and my pace dropped to the mid to upper 6:20's.

Mile 8 had some uphill portions into the wind and my pace was 6:39. I also saw my highest HR in this mile at 185. I didn't want to blow up and was running over my lactate threshold. Around this point there was also a sizable gap between the people that I was running with and the next group up the road. I tried to back off to have some others lead our group into the wind, but nobody was up for that - oh well!

Miles 9-12 were back in the mid 6:20's for pacing, and eventually it seemed like we got a little benefit from the wind, but the trees dampened the help we could get.

I really wanted to kick the last mile, hoping to be close to the 1:24 mark, but I ended up getting a nasty side stitch just after mile 12. I guess running with a HR higher than what I averaged in my last 5k was finally catching up to me! I brought it home with the last mile in 6:38, and was happy to see the finish. I got passed by a few people in that last mile - I like to be the one doing he passing at the end, so I wasn't all that happy about that!





Obviously having injuries doesn't help, so mitigating the injuries would definitely help. Hopefully I can be injury free over the seven week lead up to Boston!

I did a 4 mile cool down at around a 8:30 pace to get in 18 miles for the day. It felt nice to cruise at an easy pace after the race.


Small injuries and not that much speed work.


I'm happy with my result from today. I would have liked to have been under 1:24 and closer to 1:23, but I know that will come. I hope my injuries are now behind me so I can have a great four weeks of training before starting my taper for the marathon.