Donovan Rebbechi <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...
Quoted message said:Thinking about this -- my philosophy is to simply not worry about running the
perfect race first time around. It's more important to have a good time and
get a score on the board. If I could pull negative splits, that would be
great.
The odds are that this approach will, almost as a side effect,
produce *the perfect first marathon race", i.e. one where the
best possible result (or reasonably close to it) is achieved
and the kind of inner experience which comes with either over-
estimating oneself or running short of one´s ability avoided.
Apart from that, nothing can be expected and everything must
be accepted as it is: you may or may not be able to increase
pace or sustain it, a sense of flow during the race or a feeling
of exhilaration after finishing may or may not appear etc etc.
Quoted message said:After thinking this over, and thinking over some advice I've received both
here and elsewhere, I've decided I'm going to start at about a 6:40 pace
(2:54 pace) and try to shoot for even or negative splits on the second half.
The next big question would be *when* to increase your pace:
I´d suggest waiting until the 25K mark even when you feel
strong - it´s better to be able to sustain that pace to the
finish (and to have or to believe to have a bit left over),
you`ll still have every reason to feel proud of having pushed
your body and mind far enough.
(No direct comparison and simply anecdotal: such a race strategy
produced a PB of 2.57 and a negative split by 4.5min for a
female runner, who was known as a middle distance runner.)
(BTW for the interests of science and pseudoscience, I´d appreciate
it if you (at some suitable time after the marathon) took the
trouble of applying your data into Paul Slovic´s "prediction
algorithms".)
Anders