Where’s the peanut butter?!

There are approximately three sides in the war for the interwebs - which are you on?

1. Non-participant - “what’s a twitter?” Also found: absorbing rays of sunshine.
2. Solipsist - “blah blah blah here are way more details of my life than anyone could possibly care about but I’ll keep on going any way because then maybe SOMEONE WILL NOTICE ME AND GIVE A SHIT!!!” Also found: waiting in line for tix to the Alkaline Trio show and thinking of witty adjectives to call him/herself.
3. Circular referentialist / credit obsessivist - “Check out this sweet link to someone who talks about something in a link from this guy that I found via @ronald http://is.gd/f00” Also found: within the top 5 commenters on random blogs demanding credit for having tweeted the topic 5 seconds before it showed up elsewhere.

I’m straddling the fence of solipsist and non-participant.

@scottsorheim shows some amazing sheep antics:

Just ran a quick map and it looks like the standard (summer) ChuckIt hill gains about 140′ and runs about 1/5 of a mile (about a 10-15% grade). Maybe I’ll remember this some day when I’m trying to find other hills to do these workouts on.

The Eugene marathon is under two months away now and this has me thinking about what to do in this last window leading up to the big day. My training schedule calls for the following on my long weekends: 20 miles (this weekend), 17, 23, 20, 20, and then the taper starts with 15, 12, 10 and then it’s go time.

A couple other things intersect, though. The 17 miler in a week is the day before the St. Paddy’s Dash which I’m registered for. And I thought about doing this (the 17 mile weekend) as my long hard run where I’d aim for about a 7 minute pace and go uninterrupted. This should be a good training exercise as well as a good confidence run so I’ll probably do it and then just do run the following day at St. Pats however I feel, but not really race it.

However, the following weekend (which is the 23 mile day) is also the Mercer Island Half. That’s a race I’m not yet registered for and if I do it, it’s $60 which honestly seems like way too much. But I could do that and just aim to PR which would also be a good training pace/distance for the marathon.

The only obvious mistake would be trying to race all three (or to do the LHR + race the next day). But however I slice it, there’s not much time left for the marathon. I’m really feeling a lot better going into this one than Portland two years ago now, though (jeez - was that really that long ago?) and even than when I was aiming for Victoria last fall. I’ve done 20 mile long runs for probably the past three Sundays and every time have been at or very close to an 8 minute pace and managed to finish every one feeling strong and last fall I was definitely struggling with just finishing the 20 miles at a (ballpark) same pace.

The other thing on my mind is the ultra I’m doing the following month. I think as long as I just take that nice and slow, it’ll all be fine (but very long and still hard). I asked Joe about last year’s course, though, and was pretty surprised. He said that the course does something the following: two 5K loops, then out on a big loop for the remaining 40k. How fast should somebody run it? He indicated that he did those 5k’s in ~58 minutes (which comes out to something like a 10 minute pace) and that in hindsight, that might have been going a little fast. Oooookkaaaayyy. It’s certainly helpful to have that perspective!

I’m not sure what’s going to be in store for me, running-wise, after this. If I don’t qualify for Boston in Eugene, I’m probably going to feel like I absolutely have to run another marathon because the rest of my running and pacing definitely indicates that that should be in the cards for me. At the same time, I’d much rather feel some flexibility to not follow the marathon training schedule to the letter so much - to be able to take my dog on more runs, to not worry if it’s late on a Wednesday and be thinking “great - I still gotta get 90 minutes in…” and to be able to do different sorts of races or types of exercise without worrying about it screwing up my schedule and volume or other goals.