Distance or Speed
A fork in the road clearly lines in front of me. I just started running again about 1 month ago and things are going well. I have always trained best when I had a goal and I have 2 goals which are on my “To Do” list. I should pick one in the next few days and start training seriously. Here are the goals:
Distance: Finish a marathon in less than 4 hours. I have run several marathons, the best of which was 4hours and 29 seconds, 5 years ago. This feels like unfinished business to me and I would like personally to break the 4 hour barrier. The race I could run is The Dallas White Rock Marathon. I will need to go into heavy training mode now to be ready. I am looking at following the Hal Higdon training plan. I have also learned of the Yasso 800 training method and that sounds interesting. In any event, If I want to do Dallas, I need to get serious. In any event, this goal needs to be a stretch goal, so I want to finish a marathon in less than 3 hours and 45 minutes.
Speed: I was a cross country runner in high school and we ran 5k races. In my mid 30's I don't expect to run as fast as I did then now, but I do have a goal I would like to accomplish: I would like to run a 5k faster than President Bush did in 2002 (actually he did a 3 mile race with a time of 20 minutes 29 seconds). Rather than worry over the extra .1 mile, I will shoot for a 5k in under 20 minutes.
Now the task at hand is to pick one of these goals and “run” with it.