Predicting Your Anticipated Marathon Time Based on Other Races

Have been running regularly through the holidays, though nothing too long, speedy or intense. Generally 30 to 45 minutes per day. Would love to kick it up a few notches but the holidays and year-end crazyness make that a challenge.

After a visit to the eye doctor the other week, my spring marathon plans may be a bit up in the air. Since the vision in the right eye is terrible and not correctable with lenses, I will be doing another eye surgery next year, quite possible in the January/February time frame. If I can get my running mojo back and ramp up to 20 milers by late January, it's possible to run a decent marathon.

Speaking of marathoning, a topic of interest to most marathoners is how to predict your marathon time based on your times in other distances. Over the years I've used rules of thumb to predict my time, such as multiplying my 10K time by 4.7 and multiplying my half marathon time by 2.1. The resulting total is my predicted marathon time, assuming I've done sufficient long distance training.

To use these formulas, you have to convert from hour/minute format to total minutes in decimal format, then after doing the calculation convert the resulting number back into hours/minutes.

For example: If I've recently run a 38 minute, 25 second 10K, to predict my marathon time, first I convert the 38:25 into decimal format. To convert 25 seconds into minutes, divide it by 60 seconds and the result is .42. Then add .42 back to 38 and you get 38.42. Multiply 38.42 by 4.7 and your marathon time is 180.57 minutes.  Now time to convert .57 back into seconds by multiplying by 60. That equals 34 seconds. Add that back to 180 and you're running a 180 minute (3 hour), 34 second marathon.

OK, that's a bit technical, so I have a better solution. Visit www.mcmillanrunning.com/index.php/site/calculator and try the great running calculator that calculates all sorts of projected race times based on a range of actual times. Typing in a 38:25 10K into this calculator generates a predicted marathon time of 3 hours, 17 seconds.  Pretty darn close to the rule of thumb.

Check it out! It's simple, quick and great!

Ran 14 Miles This Weekend...Most I've Run in 4 Months

Perfect weekend to run...temperatures in the 60s, no wind, no rain. So I ran. Not too hard, but I got out there. Six and a half miles on Saturday, 8 miles today. My hamstrings are tight and my rump is sore, but I"m surviving.

I looked back and this is the most I've run in one weekend since the weekend of September 10-11, the weekend prior to my detached retina surgery.

Something I'm learning more and more with age is that my body needs more time to recuperate from runs. When I was younger, I could force the issue and run hard day in , day out. Not so these days. Old habits are hard to break though...

Running a Local Turkey Trot While Still Feeling Sub-Par

Seems that as I age, I'm "off" more days than I'm on. After my 45 day hiatus I started back up with running. Then all of 18 days later I'm back with what's become my standard early winter cold.

I'm always wondering what I can possibly due to eliminate this issue of catching colds when those around me are sick. Sometimes it just feels impossible. A co-worker had been sick for several weeks and while I steered pretty clear of her, her office is next to mine and many of the documents she touches come to me. So while I diligently washed my hands as much as I could, there was only so much I could do.

Then of course my wife was sick for several weeks. Hard to stay away from her :>

November 14th was my opthamologist visit to check out the eye with the no-longer-detached-retina. The first words out of his mouth as I sat face to face, just a foot away from him, was "I just got over a cold that knocked me out all weekend." CRAP I'm thinking. There's absolutely no way out of this situation. He's literally touching my eye and placing drops in it and I'm thinking, I'm screwed. Sure enough 3 days later the storm in my sinuses and throat came.

T-shirts like this never get worn by yours truly. This color just doesn' do it for me.In any case, the cold made it (as usual) into my lungs and I'm coughing up stuff in large chunks in shapes like Maine, New York and Massachusetts every morning and my chest hurts from all the hacking. And a week later was Thanksgiving and we had no out of town plans, so I figure, why not go run the local Turkey Trot at The Oaks mall.

The race got off to a nasty start for me. With only 20/70 vision in my right eye (more on this situation in a future post), my depth perception is in bad shape and I didn't see the bump in the road 10 steps into the race serves as a walkway towards the mall. After nearly falling flat on my face, both hamstrings immediately were sore. It was bizarre, like they decided to go on strike. They weren't sore before that. All I could think of is that my body simply was telling me it wasn't ready to be speedy again, 25 days into running again and 11 days since my first 5K since coming back.

But this was a "fun run" for me and I kept on running. While running isn't so fun for me when my hams are sore and my chest is full of yucky stuff, I continued onwards to at least break under 20 minutes, several minutes slower than my "typical" 5K time. But hey, I'm still glad I did it.

Tonight, December 1st, I'm still coughing to some degree and have a little bit of stuff left in my chest, but I feel good enough to have my first glass of red wine for about 3 weeks. Yay!

I see Conejo Valley Guide on the back of this shirt. :>