(Almost) Nothing To Lose

It's only a week until the Melbourne Marathon and I'm the least marathon ready I have been for many, many years. My race recovery time following the Townsville marathon and the Tan Ultra 50km (which I ran on two consecutive weekends in August) was unexpectedly extended by the knee injury I incurred at work, which means that for the last 5 weeks my running has been very sub-standard. And while all of that has driven me back to doing some quality cross training and my knee has now come good, I'm feeling tired from the new/different training stimulus and not marathon fit. Given all of that, and the fact that it's too late to do anything else(!), it's time for me to have a smart taper week.

Paradoxically, while the odds of me running well in the Melbourne Marathon are zero, I'm actually looking forward to it and am feeling positive about it for reasons which have nothing to do with performance or success. I have fronted up to the start line of the Melbourne Marathon in good race shape on several occasions and yet on one of those occasions I DNF-ed and on another I was struck by a recurring hamstring problem at about 28km and ended up finishing in a slow 3.30. The Melbourne Marathon is in fact one of only two races in my ~30yr running history that I have ever DNF-ed in and for a long time it was an event that had me psyched out because of that. So ...... while this year I may be very marathon unfit, I'm confident that I'll finish it and with any luck I'll do it a smidge under 3.30 :) Marathon success/failure is indeed a relative and subjective thing, and for me on this occasion I feel like there's almost nothing to lose in next week's Melbourne Marathon. I'd have to have a shocker for it to be as bad as it was on the two forgettable occasions I've recounted here. But note that I've said "almost nothing to lose". That's because I've had enough shockers in my running life to know that there's always the possibility of another. That said, as slow and painful as it may be, I'll be doing all I can next Sunday to make sure that this year's Melbourne Marathon is not another one of those.

And now to non-running trivia .... I bought my new Kindle! It is fabulous :)