Welcome

When I started training for my first marathon, I only had one goal - beat everyone I was related to. I verified their times, did a couple of training runs and was pretty confident that, with enough work, beating 4:30 was achievable. Plus, it gave the added advantage of beating Oprah (4:29). Then uncertainty and a little bit of over-confidence set it. It turned out my dad wasn't absolutely sure on his time. Was it 4:30 or did he break 4:30 or was it maybe closer to 4:20? "Well," my over-confidence stepped up and said, "We'll just beat all those times. How about 4:15 as a goal?" Oops, I'm sorry. That statement was actually what my confidence said. My over-confidence took one look at 4:15, let out a cocky laugh and said, "Tod, my friend, we are going sub 4 hours."

Well, here we are, over 7 years later, with 4 marathons and 8 half-marathons under my belt, and I have proven my confidence right by breaking 4:15 twice. My over-confidence continues to give me the death stare over its darkened sunglasses and asks with a sneer, “Are you ever going to go sub 4? Ever? EVER?”

So, this year, I started a much better training program that avoids most or all of the pitfalls I have succumbed to before. And as might be expected when one falls in a pit, injury ensues. I have dramatically bruised my Achilles tendon. Since there are no actual pictures of the injury (and therefore can’t prove me wrong), I will just say that it was swollen to roughly the size of a golf-ball. I have suffered additional Achilles tendonitis, extensor tendonitis, and now plantar fasciitis, which I am currently suffering through. All of these injuries were caused by over-training (adding too many miles too quickly) in the build-up to a marathon. And if I missed a few days or a few weeks of training, I would just pile on more miles to “make up for it.” So, this time, I am running almost every day, and doing a much more gradual build-up where I increase my mileage by no more than 5% per week. I will also not even start training for a marathon until September 2010, but I will run monthly half-marathons to keep the pressure on and to help me gauge my process as I go.

It all seemed very reasonable and thought out. And then something happened. Some part of my brain recognized that breaking 4 hours truly started to appear very do-able and acknowledged that my plan seemed to have a very high chance of working. So, clearly that plan was foolish for its absolute lack of foolishness. What I should be doing was figuring out how to qualify for Boston, by running a 3:15

Boston is pretty much the only major marathon that you have to qualify for. You can qualify for New York (and it is harder to qualify for) but you can also get in on a lottery. There are other ways to get into Boston, too (raise money for charity, know someone with connections). But that’s not the point. It’s not that I am dying to run the Boston Marathon in its own rights. I want to be able to say that I qualified. Because, for me, it seems impossible. No, that’s not quite true. It seems almost impossible. Because maybe…just maybe...I could do it. It would take a lot of work, a lot of dedication, and a little luck.

This blog is going to track the work I do to get my pace down and my mileage up. It’s going to capture what kind of capabilities might be required to even stand a chance at Boston. I’m going to dig up stories of other people who have qualified, and other people who have failed. I’m hoping at the end of this, I will have done two things:

1. Qualified for Boston or absolutely proven to myself that it is just not in the cards.
2. Helped anyone reading the blog do the same thing for themselves.

And this is obviously a very public forum. I hope to get your input, advice, and ideas. I’ll be posting a weekly summary of my training to help gauge my progress. And I’m setting myself a 5-year limit, ending on Patriots’ Day, April 20, 2015. So, here goes…

BOSTON OR BUST.