73 days until 42.2

Over the last few days (real­ly months) I’ve strug­gled with whether to reg­is­ter for the Mohawk-Hud­son Riv­er Marathon in Octo­ber. I detailed the dilem­ma in my last post but the quick ver­sion is whether to go for the dis­tance or to try to get more speed at a short­er distance. 

The deci­sion is made. I’ve reg­is­tered for the full 42.2.

I cheat­ed on the big deci­sion. In addi­tion to Mohawk-Hud­son I also reg­is­tered for the Upstate Clas­sic Half Marathon in late Novem­ber. Tem­per­a­tures should def­i­nite­ly be low­er and I’ll have anoth­er month and a half to gain speed. If I can beat my 2004 half marathon time in 2024, that will be my best shot at it. Why not both?

Now comes the hard part: I have to do the train­ing. For­tu­nate­ly I’ve been doing the train­ing but until now I’ve had the option to bow out, slack off, or even over­do it and have to take some extra rest. Now I have to have a plan, and I have to stick to it.

My run­ning bud­dy Dylan uses the app Run­na to plan his train­ing. There’s no short­age of train­ing plans out there but I’m at least going to start the Run­na tri­al to see what it suggests.

I prob­a­bly need a new watch. My two and a half year old Apple Watch SE does­n’t have enough bat­tery life to get me through a run­ning work­out over five hours. It died after mile ten of last year’s Mohawk-Hud­son Riv­er Half Marathon. 

I’ve got­ten bet­ter bat­tery life out of it since then by dis­abling the voice announce­ments fea­ture for my pace alerts, and play­ing with GPS options, air­plane mode, and low pow­er modes. There may be more I can do like tak­ing the map off of my main screen in my run track­ing app Work­Out­Doors. I will want pace reminders on the marathon and I need to be able to trust that my watch will sur­vive the whole way.

My first choice is to wait for the release of the Apple Watch Ultra 3 next month, since I’m already used to the Apple Watch. I’m tempt­ed to con­sid­er a Garmin instead, but I don’t think right now is the best time to relearn new systems.

I’m not sure exact­ly how crazy I am to have sched­uled three major races six weeks apart from one anoth­er. My cal­en­dar also has two 15K races this year, in Novem­ber and Decem­ber. What­ev­er the scale I’m sure I have a non-zero val­ue for crazy.