boston marathon prognosis

today the odds of running my fifth consecutive boston marathon increased to better than 60/40 (maybe 65/35) in my favor. after a week of no running whatsoever - excluding a brief two miler on saturday - i was anxious to get out and run. no adverb needed - any kind of running would do under the circumstances.

saturday's two miler was an easy out and back; and 8:49 mile out and and an 8:27 home. 17:16, an 8:38 pace. my leg was still swollen for this run, but aside from some minor gait issues, there was no pain. while the swelling was taking it's sweet time to fade away, i was making progress. still, all that inactivity made me gain weight - and it was depressing to realize that all that hard earned weight reduction was negated by a week with my leg elevated. on the plus side, the nagging cough that had lingered for more than a month finally disappeared.

sunday had me doing a lot of walking. while not planned, it did seem to further what i optimistically consider my active recovery. it seemed that i spent the entire morning walking all over central park - and when i wasn't moving, i was standing at my course marshall location for almost 2 hours. that afternoon, when anthony mentioned that i seemed to be limping, i thought i may have overdone it with the walking.

this afternoon, to assess how realistic the trip to boston would be, i went out for what is my typical 6 mile training run on the post road. the awkward gait issue reappeared in the first mile, but soon disappeared as i got back into the groove along the familiar stretch of road.

my splits were:

8:05

7:53 15:59

7:32 23:31

7:46 31:17

8:13 39:31

7:36 47:07

7:51 average pace

needless to say, i was very happy with this outcome. that i could get this "typical" base run in after only one week of recovery made me optimistic that i could run boston this weekend! while i've abandoned my time goal - which was to run under 3:30 and simply re-qualify for 2009 - finishing will be reward enough.