Rock and Roll Arizona Marathon - Preview

This is it. The first marathon weekend in my “year of whoring myself out to the competitor group” “year of rock and roll marathons”!! It seems like just yesterday I was limping around in San Diego, CA talking to my wife about how I just tried to run half a mile and failed. Hello stress fracture. It was a low point of 2009 for sure.

This week at work has been so busy, but yet gone by so slow, that none of the normal pre race logistics have been completed. I don’t know where the expo is, I have no clue how I am getting to the start, what I am wearing, and I don’t know where my wife is going to stop and cheer for me. BUT – I do have my meals planed for tonight and tomorrow night. Priorities. A few of us (bloggers) are going to meet up at PF Changs tonight - pictures to follow.

Even though I haven’t had time to think much about the race logistics, I have thought about how long I would like to be running on Sunday. Like usual, I’ve created three levels of goals (because I am a big tool). In order of most important:

Goal A: Don’t get hurt. I’ve got another one of these marathons in 6 weeks.
Goal B: Don’t get a personal worst. Currently my PW is 4:05
Goal C: Run a 3:45

I’m planning on lining up with the 3:45 pace group and running with them for a while. I run 8:30 during long run training so this should hopefully be no problem. Famous last words. Honestly, if I could hit goal A and B I'll be super happy. If I'm still with 3:45 at 20 miles, I may kick it up to 3:30 pace and see if I can't take off a few minutes.

Finally, something that I am VERY excited about. We had T-Shirts made up for my “cheering squad”. Gone are the leather mini skirts and pink tube tops that I force my "posse" to normally wear.

Since my wife has a crap-ton of family that live here, I think that we’ll have a pretty good group of people who come out to cheer. Here I am modeling one of the T-Shirts:

The design was by my wife and the actual artistic creation (drawing) was done by yours truly. We had 12 of them made up so that we would have enough sizes for people to wear them at ALL of the Rock and Roll races that I do this year. Let me know if you want to come cheer me on - we've got S through 2XL. Cowbell not included.