Upcoming Races

I realize I haven't been mentioning my race plans, because I didn't really have any, other than Seattle, so I thought I'd update things. So I was looking at my training calendar last Thursday, and I realized that if I ran the races I had planned/was considering I could qualify for the Marathon Maniacs.

So here's the plan:

Next weekend (20 September) I'll be running the Tunnel Medal Marathon. I was considering the Oktoberfest Marathon 2 weeks later as I looked at the calendar but as a Nic pointed out when I asked him and Betsy about Maniac membership: hotel + $95 vs. $25. And it still falls in my 90 day goal window for the Maniacs.

Kind of a spur of the moment thing. Surprisingly I'm not particularly worried about it. I'm just going to run it as a long training run, not 'race' it. I figure it eats up my goal mileage for the weekend, all in one day. :)

On Halloween, I'm going to try my hand at my first 12 hour race, the Carkeek 12 Hour. The same pair of endorphin dealers above suggested the race on Facebook, and well... I'm just a sucker. :)

Val's cool with it, but her response could be best paraphrased as: "Cool, go run your legs off. Then come home and take your daughter Trick or Treating." :) She is encouraging me to go the entire 12 hours though. It's all about the relentless forward motion. The course is a ~2 mile loop with 430 feet of gain per loop, so it's pretty tough. My goal is to do the whole 5:1 run:walk walk the uphills thing, as long as I can, and then switch to whatever keeps me moving to get as much mileage as I can. I'd like to keep the Run:Walk interval and pace relatively high for the 'marathon' and possibly my first ultra at 50K. Anything after that is gravy.

I need to get out to Carkeek Park for some practice runs, but scheduling has been a pain. I really need to figure out if I need to need some trail shoes for this, and if I do I need to get them broken in. I also need to look at a different, thicker, jacket instead of my super bright windbreaker. I suspect the weather may be a little less than comfortable.

The final run of the cycle, at least for 2009 will be the Seattle Marathon. I'm training for a 3:45 finish, since all my other races say I should be able achieve that. Hopefully Carkeek doesn't mess with this goal too much.

And then next year I'm pretty locked in on doing the Mount Si 50 Miler in April.