Funky Souls and 100 Mile Goals

I'm in a strange mental funk at the moment, maybe a touch of post-marathon blues. Having originally signed up for the White Rock marathon as an interim goal to help me prepare for the Rocky Raccoon 100, it took on a life of its own and became a major goal race.  Maybe I underestimated how much of myself I threw into it, because now that it's done I'm struggling to maintain the same intensity and passion.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still hitting most of my workouts, and had a great half marathon race at Decker, but the drive is not as strong.

Though that can also be deceiving. I ran 10 miles on Tuesday morning and just didn't feel like pushing it. I coasted for a large part of the run, but still ended up averaging 7:30s.

Which is great.  And it's not such a bad thing to pull in for a while.  The ideal scenario would be to come down a little and peak again in early February.

Because I'm not yet within the gravitational pull of the Rocky start line.

And I know that come race day I'll have my game face on.

But as the euphoria of getting that BQ at White Rock fades, I'm wondering if maybe the downside of smashing my marathon goal so emphatically is that I really don't know what I can replace it with. I guess I could aim to break 3:10, and the obvious goal would be to try for a sub-3 hour marathon, but I don't know if I'm capable of running any better than I did in Dallas.

But that's a discussion for another day. In the meantime, I need to regroup and focus on Rocky.

And I have an idea on how to do that.

One of the quirks with both my 100 milers was that I correctly predicted my finishing times to within 5 minutes. I usually write my prediction down beforehand, seal it into an envelope and leave it for Nancy to find.

But I want to do this one a little differently, so I'm going to post my goal right here on Welshrunner central. This isn't news to those of you I run with regularly as I've been discussing it since the summer, but for the rest of you here it is:

My goal for the Rocky Raccoon 100 miler is to finish under 20 hours.

That equates to almost a minute a mile faster than my previous RR finish of 21 hours and 35 minutes two years ago.

I really don't know if I can do it or not, but I'm going to try. And just like I did at White Rock, I'm going to go out with all guns blazing - death or glory - and if I crash and burn, well at least I'll be happy with the knowledge I left it all out there.

Besides, I've never DNFed a race and do not intend to start with this one.

But it seems there's something about publicly stating a goal that works for me and gets the adrenaline and blood flowing.

So bring it on!!!!

Here's the race plan that will hopefully get me there.

Loop	Time	Distance	Pace
1	3 hours	20 miles	9 min/mile
2	3.5 hours	20 miles	10.5 min/mile
3	4 hours	20 miles	12 min/mile
4	4.5 hours	20 miles	13.5 min/mile
5	5 hours	20 miles	15 min/mile
Totals	20 hours	100 miles	12 min/mile