7 weeks

Three dates in seven weeks: 4 August - Waiatarua 10km; 25 August Millwater Half; 8 September North Shore Marathon; the final one being an acid test, perhaps to lead to a fast Auckland Marathon on 20 October.

Waiatarua, I've never run before. I've enter two years and on both occasions it's been flooded by unexpectedly heavy rains. Being an inner city wetland is rather unique but clearly comes with a huge negative for organising events. When Run Auckland reconsidered its event this year I was amazed it still made the cut. It'll be my last 10km for the year and had always been one that I'd intend to be my fastest but with the niggles and flu I haven't really had a good lead-in. I'll still give it a good lash though and try to have some workouts in the next two weeks to get myself moving fast.

Millwater 2019 was a fond memory for me, a half marathon that cut 4 minutes off my best time, and an usually strong kick that I finished it with. Now running it for the third time, I know the course's idiosyncrasies quite well. It would be still a challenge to make a new PB considering my time at the Waterfront Half was on a course that was flat as a pancake, and Millwater has 170m of ascent but in a way that's the perfect goal for me. This will be the stepping stone for the North Shore Marathon which is as lumpier than any other.

North Shore Marathon 2019 by contrast was a bitter pill. I'd felt that I'd trained perfectly but it turned to custard whether it be because of pacing, which was overoptimistic; my race day nutrition, which was still based on whole foods; or just dumb bad luck, that of all days that my body had to have the stitch it chose that day. I went through the halfway point at 1:41, and did the second half in 2:03. (Compared with the Auckland Marathon I did 8 weeks later, 1:42 and 1:47 on a flatter course.) I really want to exorcise this memory with a good effort and time. Against me is this recent period of training and the fact that it is a significantly more difficult marathon. I might just choose to make this a stepping stone to the Auckland Marathon, which is just 6 weeks later.

My training might have been inconsistent in the last 2 months and sometimes feel I've "lost" some of the edge that I must have had to get me to good times at the Waterfront Half and the Rotorua Marathon, but a run yesterday cheered me up. I repeated one of the better workouts from that period and matched those times and set segments records in the process. It was also the first run since Rotorua that was over 30km, a distance that really does strengthen. All things going to plan next weekend I'll have another 30km+ run and between Waiatarua and Millwater will hopefully break 100km/week twice, a sweet spot of training. Millwater will be a good measure of what I should expect of myself in the North Shore and Auckland Marathons. On paper, it seems easy enough... At least 7 weeks isn't long to wait.