Last Long Run and Taper

After the frustration at work and then the computer problems Friday, through the weekend and still continuing, at least I can give an update on my running. I did my long run starting going up a hill, mostly about a 1.5 or so mile uphill, similar to the 2 mile climb of MCM in just under 3 weeks now…one part a much steeper run than I will be facing that day. The rest was mostly flat with again a bit of uphill at the end, similar to the end of MCM….

Mile 1: 9:16
Mile 2: 9:45 part of it up a REALLY steep hill
Mile 3: 8:58
Mile 4: 8:58
Mile 5: 9:27
Mile 6: 9:10
Mile 7: 9:04
Mile 8: 8:41
Mile 9: 9:48 water and gel stop
Mile 10: 8:59
Mile 11: 9:07
Mile 12: 9:32
Mile 13: 8:42
Mile 14: 8:34
Mile 15: 8:47
Mile 16: 8:47
Mile 17: 8:55
Mile 18: 10:05 another water stop at a pump stop, so took longer
Mile 19: 8:56
Mile 20: 9:12
Mile 21: 9:25 up a hill
Mile 22: 9:21

Total run time was 3:22 or something like that, 9:11 overall average pace which is 1 minute per mile slower than my planned pace…I would’ve liked it if I had gotten my paces up at the end of the run none of my miles were the planned marathon pace, but I did do a compare to my long runs from last marathon to this one and found this:

Long runs of 18+ mileage (with one exception for this training) and comparison paces.

M2M	Dist/Pace	MCM	Dist/Pace
10	20M 9:14	12	20M 8:55
8	18M 9:11	10	22M 9:19
7	20M 10:10	8	18.5M 9:11
6	14M 9:08	6	13.4M 7:46
5	22M 9:23	5	20 9:23
4	18M 9:19	4	16M 9:15
3	18.88M 9:08	3	22M 9:11

OK, I can't get rid of the big space in the table, and that's the best way to read the pacing, so oh well...took me long enough to get that done anyway. It's been a long time since I coded a table for HTML and I used to do them all the time!! The first column is the marathon and weeks from the marathon (10 weeks out, 3 weeks out, etc) the second is the miles run and the average pace...looks like I'm a bit better off from MCM...but does that mean that much?? I was only comparing 18 miles plus, and then added one more cause it was the 1/2 and I thought that was kind of important...

Anyway, of course the taper freak out is happening, the job thing isn't helping me much either, and I think I'm getting some kind of cold, at least I seem to have a bad kind of cough going on and that's really not good...sigh...I'm running my last semi hard run tonight. 8-10 mile tempo run and then just some other light intervals and marathon paced runs. Only 19 days to the marathon.