Magic mile

OK, so Jeff Galloway is a genius!

I was surfing the web yesterday, all running sites, and went back to the marathon training plans at his site. He has perfected a formula which calculates your projected marathon pace depending on your mile speed at the hardest effort. So one runs a mile at the fastest speed, without puking(his words), and multiply that time by 1.3 to get the marathon pace.

So this morning I ran a mile at my hardest pace- still came out to be 14minmile and so what do u think my marathon pace is?? a very slow 18.2minmile. Which means I will be finishing my marathon in 8 hours. Which means there is no need for me to go to San francisco this October or else they will hand me a broom and ask to sweep after the back of the pack!

So how is J.G a genius? because 18.2 was my pace at the last long distance of 18.6 miles I did. If I had known the formula before I could have just predicted my time for that session as more than 5 hours instead of thinking naively that I could cover 20 miles in 5 hours.

Of course when I did this mile, it was the first mile of the day, and what he is recommending is doing a mile warmup , followed by the magic mile, followed by easy run, so to include this in the shorter LSD. On top of this I had bad shin splints today, dont know why as I have been stretching off and on . Also GB was not there to push me to run a tad bit faster, or to try and walk at 4mph instead of 3.5mph. Not that the absence of any of those factors would have helped me run faster.

So this is where we stand, 50 days before the M-day.
Is there any way we can increase our pace at this point-- I dont know. But hope sustains life, and I am hopeful, or have my head stuck in sand - in denial.

And just for some information- to complete a marathon in 6.5 hours, my magic mile should be run in 11 min. Ha Ha ... ha ha!!