Shamrock Marathon

The 2009 Shamrock Marathon was held on a gorgeous spring day. In Virginia Beach it was clear as a bell. The whole weekend probably had 15-20,000 people attend; i think the biggest draw was the half-marathon on Saturday. Maybe 3,000 people competed in the marathon on Sunday.

At the 8am starting time it was 35F in the bright sunshine with just a very slight breeze. It warmed up about 5 degrees each hour, so that soon it was 45, tailing off to reach a high just over 50F.

I ran instrumented and was very happy with the results. I managed my oxygen debt well and took short slow-down breaks when it was getting too high. I was very pleased with that. I figure it added five miles to the race for me.

I ran well through about mile 21, but then i was just pooped and started taking regular walk breaks. That corresponded to the start of a hill on the second half of the race, leading out to Fort Story (a working US Army Fort) and an old lighthouse. We gained about 50 feet in altitude - not that much, but enough to really drain me.



My finish time was 5:10, for an average pace of 11:37. Not what I would like, but certainly what I had expected. Too many cookies and not enough long, slow runs will do that. Now that the weather is getting nicer I can fix that easily!

Confuseled

I'm being confuseled by the Suunto. According to its auto-calculate, it puts my experience through its formulas and tells me I'm a national-class athlete. Wouldn't THAT be nice! When I take any single workout I've done and analyze the numbers against the tables, it tells me that I'm a typical weekend warrior. There's a world of difference being able to keep up a 5.5 min/mile pace for 12 minutes, and keep up an 8 min/mile pace for 12 minutes.

I don't know what gives. I'm inclined to use the lower numbers for conservatism' sake. The downside there is that I won't improve as fast if I am always setting the bar low so that every effort looks like a huge percentage of my capacity. On the other hand, I will needlessly tire myself out and not recover sufficiently if the number is too high. It will be like "oh, you only need a day to recover from this 80-mile death march, plan on more the next day". And I will get injured and go nowhere.

There's lots on the internet about how use the older t6 model, but not very much on the t6c. I don't have a good sense on how similar they are in terms of data and algorithm.

I hope that Shamrock will provide me with some good data points to use that I can make some sense out of.