Since i’ve had the chance now to fully recover from my Steamtown marathon performance, I have to say that i’m feeling pretty good afterward. One thing that I have to say, and I think I said something similar after the Harrisburg and Delaware marathon to some extent was that I really enjoyed running the race yesterday… for some reason, knowing that I wasn’t pushing myself to hit a certain time and was just out there to run it, really made the difference. The fact that I ended up with a decent time was all the better, but overall it was just a good run ..

There are some races that i’m just defeated at the end of a race .. (LHVM, NJ, Cape May, Steamtown last year, etc) but here I wasn’t defeated. I sat for only 2-3 minutes afterward and then headed for the bag pickup and headed home. I even got out for a 2.5 miler this morning that felt good, I actually ran it pretty quick as well, that must mean something.

So seriously, stick to the concepts I wrote about again yesterday on keeping your pace … train for a faster pace, but then relax it when you run the race, it really does work. The official results were posted, I ran an average of 8:43/mile, which is great in my opinion and I placed in the top 40% of finishers, I really can’t complain. I don’t have my splits because my watch ran out of memory (actually, I never fixed it after the last one), but I know my pace was about that.

Lastly, to share a story about why setting, then keeping your pace is important came out of yesterday .. if you recall back to previous postings, I always speak about a guy I nicknamed ‘studboy’, who always goes out too fast, and rips his shirt off and acts like he’s a competitor when he’s just a middle-pack guy like me. I saw him yesterday at Steamtown once again .. he apparently didn’t do the shirt thing because he had his shirt on, but regardless, I didn’t pass him until about mile 19 or so and did a double take when I saw hime because I remember passing him while he puked at like mile 17-18, I couldn’t believe I was passing him again the next year. I never saw him pass me again yesterday as I was keeping a really good pace compared to him, and then afterward I checked the results, and he overdid it once again. He was smoking up the course through mile 18, I think he was like 2:26 at 18 miles (note that I was at 2:34 at 18 miles).. do you know that he finished with something like a 4:34? It took him 2:08 to run 8 miles, thats brutal and shows me that the fact that he ran an 8:11/mile for 18 miles, then ran almost a 16:00/mile for the last 8 proves my point. He didn’t set his pace (or he set it, and was too optimistic), and died at the end. I couldn’t imagine a 16 minute mile, thats painful to endure … but it proves my point.

Anyway, I gotta run ……… i’ll write more later ….