Monumental Marathon- Let’s do this!

I’m going to run the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon…at least thats the plan right now :). If you read my thoughts a couple of weeks ago in the days following the Chicago Marathon, I had initially ruled out running the IMM…it was going to be too soon and I was fired up to chase that 2:45 again.

After some reflecting and talking with Lindsey, I decided I don’t really want to recovery, train, taper, travel and race again at one of the many December marathons I was considering to go after 2:44:59 again. I’m just not into that…and really its the traveling that I don’t want to do.

Over the course of the last eight weeks, we have not been home as a family a single weekend and I’m over it. We had a baptism, vacation, a wedding, surgery recovery in Btown, family in town, surgery recovery in Crown Point, Chicago, and then last weekend the Columbus Marathon expo. I’m ready for some nice “down” time at home with Lindsey and Marshall and the idea of traveling to AL or DE for a race in couple of weeks after Thanksgiving was wearing me out. So with all that being said that brings me back to the IMM and I’m going to run it.

I go into this marathon with eyes wide open…I am 100% positive this is not optimal for racing but that does not really concern me. I WANT to run it with Collin and see what happens. Collin is hoping to break 2:50 so I’m going to pace it out with him and if I blow up or feel like crap…oh well. I’ll just run it in nice and easy.

You could debate this topic all day long about whether or not to run the race so soon after Chicago and really feedback has been somewhat spilt. I have sought out the opinions of many very smart runners, coaches, twitter, blog people etc and everyone seems to have an opinion. I welcome all of it and am open to pretty much all of it. I am sure that I have worn Lindsey out with all the chatter but following the bad taste Chicago left in my mouth it was all consuming.

I have made peace with what happened in Chicago. I made some mistakes early, it was a bad day in general, and probably a bad time to race logistically for me. Oh well. Lesson learned.

I am looking forward to Saturday. I get to sleep in my own bed Friday night and then wake up and run the roads I know so well on Saturday. I’m going to work my ass off as best I can and let the clock stop when it stops.

You know what else I am looking forward to? Making the all important decision about what Thanksgiving Day race to do. That will be top priority after Saturday. It is between the Drumstick Dash, a huge local race here that supports Wheeler Mission and everyone loves it.  Or one back home. The Drumstick is 4.5 miles and the one at home is a 10K. It will probably come down to when do we want to travel…Wednesday night or Thursday after the DD.

Good luck to everyone racing this weekend especially Katy, Jake, Amy, Sean, Collin, Dan, Gabe and all of the Back on My Feet runners out there. There are a lot of big goals being chased Saturday! Go crush some dreams.

Get fresh this week! Race well and kick ass! I’m sure I missed some people. 

Here’s a throwback picture of Lindsey & I running IMM in 2009: We ran this untrained on a whim and squeezed in just under 4 hours.