A week from today I’ll be up in Wisconsin, running the Green Bay Marathon. Much like my post one week prior to the New Orleans Marathon, I’m feeling rather happy to be done with the last long run. Better yet, unlike back then I’m thankfully not recovering from any sort of illness. My current problems are all mental (and/or generic joint achy-breakiness). I was taking at look at my training log – I love that it’s so easy to export this to CSV format from daily mile! Anyway in the time since January 16th, the day I started my 18 week training cycle, I’ve run 723.4 miles, roughly 42.5 per week. This is a bump of 60 miles over the pre-New Orleans cycle, which should translate into greater fitness later in the race when the going gets tough. And as the plot to the right should show, I’m still making some gains in the speed department.

Let’s google race news! Unfortunately it looks like the mayor of Green Bay (Jim Schmitt) has twisted his ankle and is dropping out. Well that sucks. And registration is down this year due to our not finishing in Lambeau Field. Huh. We really need some positive news here. Ok here’s something about volunteers helping some disabled folks in the race. That’ll do.

Song of the week, Slow Show by The National. I’ve listened to this song entirely too many times.

Two weeks til the Green Bay Marathon. I’m technically supposed to be tapering but it didn’t really happen this week. Next week will be slower & shorter.

Accommodations for the Bayshore Marathon, the second race of my upcoming trip have been finalized. Against rational judgement I’ll be camping the night before as all hotels within an hour of Traverse City are either sold out or charging $200 a night. Instead I’ll sleep on some dirt & still try to wake up by 5am.

Song of the week, Make Some Noise by the Beastie Boy. Here’s the 30 minute version. RIP MCA.

You can sign up now for text or email updates for the upcoming Green Bay Marathon here. My bib number will be 879, a good solid nice & low number. It’s not a prime (being divisible by 3) but 877 and 881 are, so 879 is nicely bracketed.

Tracking for Bayshore isn’t available yet.

I’ve been playing with this McMillan race calculator thing tonight, plugging in my recent races. From each of those times it calculates an estimated marathon time for me, all of which are considerably (20-25 minutes) faster than my goal time of 3:50. So maybe I’m sandbagging a bit. I ran a 7:23 split for my last half-marathon, maybe it’s not unrealistic to think that I could stick an 8:23 in Green Bay for a 3:40 race. Particularly now that I’ve got the power of GPS on my side.

Also a postscript, unrelated to anything I usually talk about on here, but I heard from KKV that Mikey’s safely out of surgery with a positive prognosis from his docs. So very very happy to hear that, and happy to be seeing both of them in two weeks!

I need change for the better in this area of my life. I just don’t have the answers right now as to how best to achieve this. A change of scenery couldn’t hurt though.

Pain free week here, good news. At 48 miles, this has been my highest mileage week since late February, three weeks prior to New Orleans (conincidentally, Green Bay is three weeks from today). I think I’m in better position now than I was then – my long run this week came in under 20 miles (19.3) but the split was 8:22, ~0:20/mile under the longs I mentioned in that previous post.

My goal for Green Bay is to run a 3:50 marathon, an 8:46 split. This would be a PR for me by ~5 minutes. If my first 19 miles are anything like yesterday’s run, I’ll be under that. My long term goal for the rest of the year is to work down to a 3:40 marathon, or an 8:23 split. That’d still be 25 minutes too slow to be a Boston Qualifying time, but that’s a problem for another time.

Speaking of yesterday’s run – this was the first time I’ve ever used the Minuteman Bikeway. I picked this up at Alewife and ran to the far terminus in Bedford. What a fantastic resource this is. I can’t believe I’ve never done this before. It’s so much easier to make good time when there are pedestrian underpasses and overpasses. And safer too, to not have to contend with sharing infrastructure with cars.

Also, to mix things up I swapped out the entirety of my (17.7 hour!) long run mix for an older mix I used to train for San Francisco in 2009, so my song of the week isn’t something I’ve heard in a while. This clicked on as I crossed from Bedford to Burlington yesterday morning, and is the only song I know of that namechecks Boston, Kansas City & Shreveport. Also, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, which I’ll pass through on May 19th. Me and Johnny, traveling the world.

One of the parts of that trip that I recall with particular clarity & joy was the walk from the Louvre to the Arc De Triomphe, through the Jardin des Tuileries & alongd the Champs-Élysées. For the duration of that walk I had the song below stuck in my head, not a particularly happy or appropriate-to-the-moment tune, but regardless. Future Bible Heroes is a side project of Stephin Merritt (of The Magnetic Fields fame).