The Miami Marathon is supposed to be my “A” race for this year. Well, technically it’ll be next year, but you get my point. And with that Scarlet Letter, each and every run I see on my training plan makes me nervous. I’ve set a lofty PR goal and I’d love to reach it. I know that you can’t always predict how a marathon will go, but I figure I may as well go with that whole shoot for the moon thing. I mean, what the hell else do I have going on? Heh.

Lately the training run that has been getting my running-shorts-panties in a wad is the pace run. I’m not lying when I say this pace is not really “my pace.” At least not yet. I was actually going to do my pace run Monday night but when I got past my warm-up mile, I talked myself out of doing it. D’oh! I ran my easy run instead. Of course I could say that I needed the easy run and justify however I could, but honestly, I was just being a chicken.


And since the pace run is so important and there is no rest for the weary, I rescheduled it for Tuesday morning. Considering it’s only the third week I’ve gotten the pace run in, I finally felt more “normal” running it than I have previously. I’ve been so nervous about going too slow that I was killing myself by going too fast. I did have a little help Tuesday morning by way of another runner in my running group who kept me on track. I am most grateful to her and actually started to feel as though I could do this. The pace felt more comfortable and more “me.”

It’s hard work getting to a lofty goal. I commend all of you who do this for each and every race. I don’t know how you do it, but I commend you. I don’t know if I have the mental strength to do it for each and every race, let alone this one.

I’ve said that this is the race where I give it my all. I don’t want to look back at this training cycle and feel like I didn’t put in the work. I want to say, “I trained hard. And it paid off!”

All in all, I guess the only thing for me to do is take it one run at a time. And stop being a chicken.

What’s a race you’ve worked extra hard for? Ever feel like you’ve set a super high goal for yourself? Can we ever achieve world peace?