A lofty thought for the new year

I was talking to a guy in my church today who also runs marathons (a lot faster than I do) and he said when he is asked for one tip to improve your marathon time he tells people, "Right from your very first training session run at the speed that will bring you in at your ideal marathon time." In other words, don't start slow and slowly build up to a better time, start fast and just work at building up your ability to maintain that speed. I like that notion, tough as it is to maintain. In order to test it out I decided that in my run tonight I'd just run as fast as I reasonably could right from the moment I left the front door. I just did my usual 6.5k route and did it exactly one minute faster than I have ever done it before! That is a big improvement over that distance and gives me hope that I can achieve a really good time in a full marathon once I learn to cope with the pain of keeping up that pace. By the way I did it in 27.5 minutes.

Let me leave you with a great quote that someone sent me today. I intend applying this to my running:
"I do the best I know how, the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing it to the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me will not amount to anything. If the end brings me out all wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."
Abraham Lincoln.
Read that quote, and read it again. Don’t just skim it – understand what it means. And get ready for a rollicking good new year.