Things have been pretty good. Had my highest volume week ever (35 miles), then the following week was a half marathon race which went great – beat my target of 1:50 with a 1:48:05 chip time. The last two miles or so of that course were brutal; you run past the finish line, up a hill, down a hill, up a hill, down a hill, up a hill, down a hill, and then sprint to end. My buddy and I ran the whole thing together until I tried to break away on the last downhill. It was going according to plan until he sprints past me about 10 feet from the finish! All in good fun.

Now I’m ramping into peak phase after that race, and kind of looking forward to it in a “rising to meet a challenge” kind of way. So far the long runs have been longer, and the mid-week runs have been more sprint / interval focused. We’ll see if I can continue to whittle down Strava’s marathon finish time prediction – steadily approaching the 4 hour mark over the last few weeks. Much less optimistic than Garmin’s prediction of 3:40.