Setting Goals and Stuff

My high school coach used to help us set goals before the state meet. He would give them to us with our itinerary before we boarded the section 2 bus. It went something like this:

name "ultimate goal" "realistic goal"

Jess 1st 1st
Elizabeth 5-10 15-30
Mollie 15-20 25-50

You get the picture. I changed the names other than mine. As you can see, I wasn't an all-star in high school. I think I was more excited about the hair ribbons and glitter than actually being focused on my racing performance.

Anyway, in the spirit of good old Coach Mindel, I have decided it's about time to set some goals for my race. We didn't really get time goals from Mindel since the weather and terrain were so unpredictable in NY in November. This race is in October and is basically flat, so I feel comfortable making time and place goals. Okie here goes:

name "ultimate goal" "realistic goal"
Mollie 1st 1st- 5th
Mollie 2:55 3:00- 3:10

That was scary. I wrote 2:59 at first, and then I felt like a wimp, so I changed it. At least I have a goal pace now, with plenty of time to work towards it.

So the other part of this goal-setting involves what happens after October 9th. My coach at JMU always encouraged us to make "process" goals rather than "outcome" goals. So taking his wisdom into account, the real goal of this marathon is to get in decent enough shape to be able to run a (gasp) race on the track. I'm going to wait until after the marathon to set any further goals because it's making me nervous just thinking about it. Obviously it would be nice to say, oh I want to set a PR in the (1500/ 5000/ whatever) but I can't even imagine that right now.

So this week has been pretty low key training-wise. After my crappy long run last Sunday, my cold took on a life of its own. It seems to be going away, but it may also be gearing up for one final push. I had 10 miles on Tuesday which I did with Pete, and 15 yesterday. Both of those runs were at a very easy pace, around 8 min/mile. I wanted to run faster, but I also want to make sure I'm fully recovered from this cold by Sunday. Today I had a 5 mile recovery run, and I also did the ab ripper from p90x. I never actually did the p90x system, but I like some of the workouts, especially the yoga and ab ripper. I started doing the yoga workout too, but had to get showered before the guy from the glass company came to fix our window. I might do that one tomorrow.

Oh, btw, its still flipping HOT.