The final moments before facing the BIG race.

At this time tomorrow I should be recovering from my 13.1 mile journey around the greater Rochester metropolitan area and hopefully will be cheering in Kiel who will be working to completing a 26.2 mile journey.

I am of course referring to the Rochester Half Marathon which takes place tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM. Today will be a day of picking up my packet, touching base with my friends who are running it, planning and packing my bag, some Advil and ice for a troublesome foot and of course... lots of carbs, anxiousness and nerves!

For those of you familiar with my previous posts on the topic, you might recall how I equated running the marathon with climbing Mount Everest and scaled distances of shorter runs to various mountains of proportional size. (see this post) So in terms of running, I summit Mount Rainier (or the Matterhorn for those of you in Switzerland). I don't take this challenge lightly either because my performance tomorrow is going to be a gauge and milestone for my fitness and ability to progress further towards running in the full marathon next fall at this time.

I don't know why I should be nervous because I have been working towards this goal for almost a year. I ran a 12 mile run without any issues 2 weeks ago. I felt completely comfortable doing so. I have put about 400 miles into training and ran various races over the past year! If you look at my training patterns (generated on www.logyourrun.com) they are probably FAR from ideal... as I have had good weeks and bad weeks where my discipline broke down and I missed some runs.
All I know is that about 2 years ago due to some significant stomach problems, my running dropped off to nearly nothing. I could not even eat breakfast without feeling nauseous! It's hard to run when you can't fuel the engine. I have come quite a ways since then... and I have no plans of stopping.

Goals for tomorrow:
Gold: time of 1:45:00 (~8:00 min/mile pace) --> A lofty goal, but I'm setting the bar high.
Silver: time of 1:51:00 (~8:30 min/mile pace)
Bronze: time of 1:58:00 (~9:00 min/mile pace)
Honorable mention: Complete the race without taking significant (>3-5 minutes) walk breaks.