Six More Miles!

Andy Richardson is a blogger at Start Running for Beginners. He is training for his first marathon using Angie’s Official Guide Ebook.

With just a few days to go until my first marathon, I have a few thoughts I wanted to share with the MTA community. I think this title “6 More Miles” summarizes where I am right now in more than one way.

Six More Miles is Not So Hard . . . (I Think)
Just a few weeks ago, for the first time I was able to reach the 20 mile mark in my long run. It was actually the first time of running one of these really long runs that I thought I might actually be able to finish a 26.2 mile marathon. Usually when I would get back from the long run, I was absolutely spent, but the last two long runs were a little different. I know that I will have to run 6 more miles than I ever did during my training, but I really feel like I can run those 6 miles, and finish my first marathon.

Taper Time
So I ran about 18 miles last week, but now it is time to start tapering back on my running. For the next few days, I am going to do very little, if any running. I will probably do some elliptical and other cross training over the next few days, along with some stretching. But I mainly want to focus on rest and letting my body get ready for the race.

Final Preparations
I have been trying to work out some of the details of the race day, so that things can go as smoothly as possible. Apparently the race I am doing, the Rock and Roll marathon of Savannah, has about 20,000 participants. Getting things such as parking and meeting places worked out ahead of time is going to be key. For example, I think I’ll go ahead and pick up my race day packet the thursday before to avoid some of the rush.

And, of course, we are picking out our race day celebration plans. I am thinking that a burger from Five Guys Burgers chased down by a large chocolate shake is going to do the trick. I have to have something to look forward to after the race, right?

Congrats
I wanted to give a shout out to Trevor and tell him congratulations for completing his first marathon in 4:31. Seeing him go from not being a runner at all to running a marathon is really cool, and it gives me encouragement that I will be fine next week too. Now, if I can just finish mine in 4:30, I will have beaten the MTA guru! Actually, at this point I think I will be happy just crossing the finish line.

Thank You
And finally, I just wanted to say thank you to Angie and Trevor, as well as you the readers, for letting me post over here during this series. I have learned a lot from this site and from all of you. I hope to put together an after race post, and maybe we can do some other posts in the future as well. In the meantime, I hope the best for your marathon training. Happy Running!

What do You think?