After the race in Vegas I was all geared up for racing the New York Marathon in early November. I had a solid seven weeks of higher mileage, then Hurricane Sandy appeared, wreaking havoc in the New York area. After learning that the marathon was canceled on the Friday before the race, I was able to quickly register for the Manchester (NH) Marathon, which was on the same day as NYC.
The Manchester course was far hillier than NYC, and I ended up running a 3:04. I'm pretty sure that would have translated into a sub 3:00 run in NYC, but I'll never know. This secured a BQ for 2014, so I'll probably be running Boston in April of 2014. Here is the course profile for Manchester:
Three weeks after Manchester I ran a half marathon in Nashua, NH. I probably wasn't fully recovered and had done little running between races, but I still set a PR of 1:23. My goal in the upcoming year is to lower that time to around 1:20.
After running the half marathon I took a little time to reflect on the past seasons. Starting in the spring of 2011 and running through the fall of 2012 I never had a break. After Beach2Battleship in October of 2011 I went right into training for Boston in 2012, then right into tri season and qualifying for the 70.3 World Championships.
I decided it was probably a good time to take it easy and let my body recuperate a bit. I took a few weeks easy in early December then of course got quite sick (probably the flu). This knocked me out for close to two weeks, resulting in very little training.
During this this time period I was made aware of a coaching service based in Colorado that was offering a sponsorship coaching program for 2013. I thought it would be worth a shot to apply and see how things went. A few weeks later, I was quite surprised to find out that I was selected by Steve Johnson of Dark Horse Multisport Coaching to be their 2013 sponsored athlete. I am psyched to have this opportunity. Steve is a very accomplished athlete, and he will take me to new places in terms of my athletic ability.
The one goal that I have in 2013 is quite simple: qualify for and race in Kona in October. It will take a lot of work, but I'm confident that Steve will devise a training plan that will have me ready on August 18th in Mont Tremblant to decimate the M35-39 AG and have me booking a trip to Hawaii for mid October.
I know that my main area of weakness is my swimming. I'm consistently chasing people down on the bike and run. It's looking like the plan for the coming year is to address this weakness by swimming 4x a week, and getting in around 12,000-13,000 yards a week. I'm happy with that, and feel that I'm already getting faster just after about two weeks of this frequency and volume of swimming. I'd love to be able to knock about 10 seconds per 100 off my average swim time, which is a sizable time savings for an IM swim.
I'll also be doing several running races, ranging from 5k to half marathon over the next few months leading into tri season. With some weekly speedwork, I'm hoping to be able to also set some PR's in those shorter distances as well.
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