the Way of the Turtle

T-5 DAYS!!!
A Nervous Countdown to SEHGAHUNDA
Monday, May 23, 2011

Five days from now I will be waiting to start the Sehgahunda Trail Marathon at along the Finger Lakes Trail through Letchworth State Park south of Rochester. This will be the 7th marathon I've attempted and hopefully my 5th finish by the time Saturday afternoon rolls around. I say hopefully because Sehgahunda is different from every other marathon I've run in having a series of time cutoffs from mile 15.4 onward, and while I think I can make them, I'm certainly not sure... and my slow finishing times at the longer races I've done this spring don't exactly fill me with confidence. It doesn't help that I also didn't complete as many long runs as I'd hoped to, before going into rest/recover mode - and while I think the course will be easier than Nipmuck (the section of the FLT I ran two summers ago, as part of the Dam Good trail race, certainly was, but that's only the first seven miles of Sehgahunda) I won't really know until I run it. So in a lot of ways this race probably has me more nervous than any other I've run in recent memory.

On the other hand, I do have some positive indicators that give me hope I'll be successful. I've got years of distance running under my belt, even if I haven't always kept up my conditioning for longer distances. During some of my longer races this spring I've comfortably maintained an average pace a few minutes slower than the paces needed to complete Sehgahunda; if I can do the same on Saturday, I'll  have a decent time cushion built up by the first cutoff, giving me some leeway if things start to go south in the latter half of the race. And while I haven't done all the long training runs I'd wanted to, I did have a couple of tough back-to-back weekends that went reasonably well.

In the end, there's only one way to know how it's going to turn out - stay healthy this week, get to the race early on Saturday, try not to go out too fast, try to keep from blowing up before the end... and go the distance.

Five days to go...

JMH