Doorbell rang yesterday around 5pm...hoped it was the oil guy here to fix the boiler...but alas it wasn't (so one more night of no hot water)... but it was the UPS guy delivering a box addressed to me. I almost never order anything that gets shipped here, so I was baffled at first...but then as I held the box (which was suspiciously just slightly larger than a shoebox) I remembered that I had mailed in that card from Saucony after my absolutely amazing 2nd place finish in the Magnolia 5k back in August. It was good enough for a free pair of shoes of my choice from Saucony. That worked out, as these were about 90 bucks and first place was $100 cash...I'll take it. I picked the Grid Type A2 and now that I have them in my hand, I'm thinking of using these to race this week and possibly at Baystate. I've never owned a pair of Saucony shoes before and haven't even really spent time looking at them in the store... I am really impressed with these. The quality looks to be very good at first glance and after popping them on and jogging around in them, I consider them to be really comfortable too... They are a little beefier than my other couple pairs of racing flats but still very light. I am going to try them out this weekend at the hilly Hollis Half Marathon and do the race at 90ish % effort, as a last long run/workout for Baystate. If they feel good, I'll run the full 26.2 in them.Between now (Hollis this weekend) and then (Baystate), I'll have the 2nd to last 5k in the Seacoast Road Race Series, which is the Great Island 5k up in New Castle, NH. This will truly be my last workout before the big one on the 19th.
This past Sunday (day after Codfish) I met up with a dozen or so of the brave souls from MVS, in the drizzle and rain, to run 23 miles over the Baystate course in Lowell / Chelmsford / Tyngsboro. It became my longest actual run ever, not by time... (that would go to the Savoy race earlier this Summer)...but by total distance. Even though I haven't really adjusted my training schedule by increasing my total mileage per week, I have added a few longer runs (20+) to try to somewhat resemble any sort of real marathon training... but other than that, I will just be showing up to Lowell on October 19th and running based on what I've done this year....so I am expecting to run (hopefully) somewhere in the high 2:30s. If I ran 2:39 and change I'd be very content...over 2:40 and I'll be back for more. I really just want my jacket.




