Thirteen Days

The taper: my least favorite part of marathon training. These next two weeks are gonna be hard. I spent two hours last night staring at the marathon course map, trying to figure out how I'll be feeling where and when, come race day.

This race runs through a ritzy gated community that I haven't been able to access during my training. So, aside from the course drive-through video on their website, I have very little experience running on the marathon course. My strategy might, then, rely on mile markers and aid stations. In my traning, I found that it was helpful to break down my 20-milers into 9-6-5 milers. I might try to modify this descending strategy to a 10-7-6-3.2 miler. Hopefully this will make sense on race day. I don't know, maybe I'm just making things up, but I really think that breaking down the marathon into shorter, more manageable chunks is really going to help me out.

I wonder how much of this planning (read: worrying) is actually worthwhile and beneficial. Something tells me I need to step back and take a big breath. Phew...thirteen days.