amkean pronunciation

The curious thing isn't so much that I've been silent, but that the 8 or so blogs of friends I follow have also simultaneously gone quiet or silent.

It's Grandma's Marathon weekend, and I'm watching World Cup soccer. I like a lot that my summer vacation coincides with matches every morning.

I learned that training properly for a marathon really does make a difference. Twenty years ago, there were a lot fewer marathons and fewer people in those marathons. The conventional wisdom was that although running was a salubrious endeavor, the marathon itself was detrimental to health. It was a test requiring extensive training and not to be repeated too often. With the increasing popularity of ultra races and the Oprah-ization of the marathon, people are focusing more on the participation rather than the time. I heard someone near me at the start saying he'd run 10 times this year.

I did almost all of my long runs, but I didn't build up weekly mileage, which I now believe is probably more important than long runs. So I ran the slowest marathon I've ever run, even slower than my first one. On one level I'm okay with that because you reap what you sow, but then again I wonder what I was doing instead of training. Not blogging.

Labels: running