Race Report: TCS New York City Marathon Training Series 12M

Date: July 21st, 2018, 7:00 am

Place: Central Park, New York, NY

Weather: 70 F, 68% humidity

Finishers: 4, 027 total (2, 161 men / 1, 866 women)

Unofficial distance / pace: 12.36 mi / 9:41 min/mi 

Official time / pace:  2:00:07 / 9:56 min/mi

As the name would suggest, the NYRR has “installed” three long-run training series to prep folks for a fall marathon. Although we are 16 weeks out from the NYC marathon, this training series is a good away to start developing/honing your marathon race strategy. Although I have run (or attempted to run) several NYC Marathons, this was the first time that I participated in this training series. This may have been the case for a couple of weeks.

• Maybe the long runs of my training schedule never matched up to the long runs during the training series.
• In the past, I do not think that the races were part of the NYRR 9+1 program.

The Race:

Pretty much from start to finish, the weather was wonderful. I was a little scared, because rain was scheduled in the forecast, but the rain pretty much held out until the early evening.

It’s kind of weird, but I really did not consider this a “race” . . . at first. To me, it was more like a long training run with close to 4,000 other people. However, that thought changed, at least for me, once the race started. Then I kind of went into race mode, but not super intense race mode.

In terms of the course, it was pretty straight forward, two loops around the other perimeter of Central Park. At this point, if you are training for a marathon and you live in Manhattan, you probably have run this course many times, so there was not anything new about the course. I would be a cool concept if NYRR could alternate the direction of the races in Central Park for the training runs. Or . . . have one of these races outside of the Manhattan.

The main plan was to run 1 minute slower than my proposed marathon pace (9:09 min/mi), so a 10:09 min/mi pace. According to my Apple Watch, I ran slightly faster than that pace, which is not too bad. Although I ran faster than what I had planned to, I still had a little fuel in the tank to run even further. Actually, I did a ‘cool down’ run from Central Park to my apt, which is about one mile.

My plan of attack was to break this race into three 4-mile segments. Breaking long distances into segments tricks my mind into thinking that I am running a shorter distance. The other plan was to run the first four miles pretty slow and pick up the speed for the remaining eight, which I more or less accomplished. During the last 3 miles, I incorporated fartleks between light posts to do some speed work during a long distance.

 

 

Next Race:

July 26th, NYRR R-U-N 5K . . . technically. However, I do not think that I will run this race, because it’s the bf’s birthday. I really need to double check these races with my calendar, because this is the second time that I have registered for a race on a day when I have other crap going on. 

August 12th, TCS NYC Marathon Training Series 15M