Friday

19 laps, 1:1 lap run/walk ratio, 31:54 minutes

Okay, my watch didn't mess up this time! I've been wearing my watch on my left wrist, over my lymphedema bandages, thinking that the bandages would insulate my watch from my arm, but perhaps not—especially in this heat, as much as I'm sweating, my bandages do get damp. So today I went back to wearing my watch on my right wrist with a piece of rubber wrapped around it, under the watch band. Don't know it if made the difference, but I had no problems with my watch today.

I didn't get out there to run until 10:30-ish, so it was pretty hot, but I kept up a good pace and finished with approximately 15:45-minute miles. Now that I've started ramping up the long runs, it really seems to have improved my speed. This is very encouraging! I'm starting to think I might be able to finish with a time comparable to my first Honolulu.

It's interesting, when I was transferring all my old training journals to this blog so that everything would be in one place, I realized that in every marathon I've done so far, something has happened to keep me from doing the best time I would have been capable of. In my first marathon, Honolulu 2001, I started out way too fast, doing 12-minute miles, and completely ran out of steam by the time I finished, slowing way down in the last four or five miles. Plus, I think I spent at least 30 minutes waiting in line for bathrooms. I finished in just under seven hours, but I should have been able to do six and a half or so.

My second marathon, San Francisco 2002, I was training on my own and doing just fine, until I made the mistake of trying to join the San Francisco Road Runners. Their slowest group was training at 12 minute miles, and they were so discouraging to me, telling me I was too slow for SF and I'd be out on the course all alone and it wouldn't be any fun and I shouldn't try to do it, that I stopped training for about four weeks in the middle. I continued to run, but didn't increase my long runs over 12–13 miles. Then I did Bay to Breakers, which was so much fun, I decided to start training for SF again. I worked out a new training schedule, skipping the final 26-mile training run, and starting up with 18 miles on the next long run. Even so, I had my best-ever time of 6:24 in San Francisco, and had a fabulous time, but I really felt the lack of the 26-mile training run and slowed down quite a bit in the last three miles. I think I could have done 6:15 or better if I hadn't stopped training in the middle.

Marathon #3, Honolulu 2002, was my worst-ever marathon! Despite training at 14-minute miles, that was the fall I was spending a lot of time driving back and forth to Tehachapi while buying and getting ready my new home. I missed a lot of midweek runs, and more than that—I got into a car accident on Thanksgiving weekend, a week and a half before the marathon, rolling my Toyota on the freeway on the way home from Tehachapi. I wasn't seriously injured, but strained a muscle in my side rather badly. Another woman in my running group had a bad knee, so we decided to run together, taking it easy, not trying to keep up a pace, but just to finish the race. Which we did—in about 8:40! It was a long one, but fun anyway.

Marathon #4 was Los Angeles 2006, the first marathon after my cancer diagnosis and treatments. I wasn't fully recovered from the treatments yet, and it was going to be a hard, slow marathon in any case, but I developed some kind of injury in my right hip less than halfway through, and ended up limping slowly across the finish line, adding at least a half hour to my projected time. Still, it wasn't my worst marathon ever! I finished in something like 7:40.

I'm not really sure what to expect from this marathon. My time has been improving, and if I can average 16-minute miles the whole way, I should be able to finish in around seven hours. That means 1) keeping up my training for the next five and a half months, 2) not getting injured, and 3) running a smart marathon, being careful not to go out too fast, to drink plenty of water, to eat my GU, and so on. It's doable... but unforeseen events always come up. I probably won't do my best marathon ever, but it would be nice, for once, to run the best marathon I'm capable of at the time.