Adventures in Onionism

Pre-Race My final race of the year was Sacramento's California International Marathon. I'd run it twice before: once in grad school on little training when I had a goal to run a marathon every year but didn't much care about my time (I've since upped that goal to a 100-miler), and in 2021 when I trained for it fairly seriously and set a PR of 2:59:18.  The West has two types of marathon courses: hilly ones and downhill ones, and then there's CIM, which is mostly flat. There's slight rollers through 15 miles or so, but the biggest is probably 30-40 feet at most, so you can still run any mile with a hill at roughly the same pace, and there's a net drop of ~350 feet.  Anyway, it's a really good course to run fast: so much so that I believe it produces the largest number of Olympic Trials Qualifiers and Boston Qualifiers of any race. That means the race is relatively crowded at the front. Here are the percentages of finishers who ran in under 3:00:00 at a fe...

 Back in January or February, however, when I contemplated trying to break 3 hours in a marathon this year, I didn't think I had enough time to do it in a spring race. I thought I would get somewhere around 3:05, and then try to maintain my consistency over the summer and break 3 at a fall race, either Steamtown or Marine Corps. But then I did end up breaking 3 at Virginia Beach. I signed up for Marine Corps anyway. I figured I should run every big city marathon while I live there at least once (though I never did Oakland or SF.) But then in September I contemplated doing hill repeats for Euchre Bar or speed work for Marine Corps, and I ended up doing mostly neither. Still, I was signed up, and so were 30,000 other people, so I figured it would be fun. My buddy L flew into town to go to a World Series game with his cousin, and he said he'd join me, so it should definitely be a fun time. Except for the weather, as it was supposed to rain a lot. But it was still just a Metro ri...

It's on. I just ran 6 miles at goal place, took full recovery, and ran 6 miles back at 10 seconds faster than goal pace. Friends told me this was a good test workout to see if you're read for for a marathon. Over the last two months I've been doing consistent weekend long runs of 17-22 miles, slowly getting faster, bringing it down from 7:22 pace to 7:04 pace, and today an average of 6:41. So, I'm feeling pretty good about beating 3 hours at the Shamrock Marathon in two weeks, even though I'm definitely worked after today's run. I've tried to do one real speed workout every week, but I haven't had the wherewithal to get up early enough and go across town to my friends' before-work hardcore workout group, so "workouts" for me usually just mean throwing in a couple fast miles. I've kept up the streak running, meaning I've run 2+ miles every day of the year so far. I ran 269 miles in February, which is my highest mileage February,...