1. I read Pete Pfitziger’s book Advanced Marathoning and learned a ton from it. I decided to try and follow one of his training plans instead of the one I had created. As you can see from the chart above, I have significantly increased both the amount of miles I am running as well as incorporating different paces and goals in each run. Do give you a sense of scale, I ran 64 miles in November, 123 miles in December, and 150 miles in January.
2. I saw a link from Scott Weitecha’s blog to the website Running Ahead, which seems more like a serious tool than RunKeeper. I am still uploading to my RunKeeper page, but RA allows me to add a training plan and also has some pretty helpful forums. (Running ahead is also where I got the mileage chart for this post. Click on the chart to see my running log, training plan, etc.)
3. I raced the Nashville Zoo Run Run 5k and placed 15th overall and 3rd in the 30-34 age group with a time of 19:23. My goal was to run sub-20, so it was a good race.
4. According the the McMillan running calculator, my projected half-marathon time is 1:29 and my projected marathon time is 3:08. Those are pretty quick. I am running the Frostbite Half-Marathon as well as the Tom King Half-Marathon.
5. In order to qualify for the Boston Marathon, I would need to run 26.2 in under 3:05. I had been planning to take a shot at that this Fall, but if I can run Tom King in under 1:28, I might be able to pull it of at Country Music (note: for the record, I think this is a really aggressive goal).
6. In order to make that goal somewhat possible, I am using the lower end of the McMillan ranges for my training (i.e. I ran 17 miles at a 7:44 pace last weekend). I am also trying to do my marathon-pace workouts at 6:50/mi pace (3:00 marathon), this should at least be good training for a sub-1:30 half-marathon.
7. The last 13.1 miles of my 17 mile run over the weekend would have been my fastest half-marathon ever at 1:38:34 (by my calculation). Not bad for a training run

2012 is going to be a big year for Bizen.

It was also possibly the first opportunity to start becoming my own man. When out for a run, you either keep up or you don’t and there is no one who can do it for you. Sometimes you have to dig deep and force yourself to keep going even when it hurts or you are fatigued.

Needless to say, I learned a lot on those runs. I learned from both the conversation with my dad as well as from the inner dialog that every runner has.

Last night the tradition continued. My oldest (Zavier, 10 y/o) went with me for a quick run at the Y. We started slow, continually increased the pace, and finished strong at the one mile mark. It was great to have that one on one time with him. It was great to see him push himself even when I could tell it was starting to get tough. I told him that once he can run 3 miles, he can go with me to run with the East Nasty Running Club.

His brothers are itching to get the same opportunity. Maybe one day you will see me running through the streets of East Nashville with all the kids in tow. If I am really lucky Erica might even be there too.

A guy can dream.

Check it out and subscribe to the podcast if you are interested in entrepreneurial things.

In the meantime, I am just going to post my calendar here with good ole HTML.

The basic ideas behind the plan are this:

• This training plan is for the Country Music Marathon in 2012.
• I am encorporating the Greenway Marathon as a long training run.
• I wil run the Frostbite Half-marathon and the Tom King Half-marathin as training races; my goal will be to run these faster than my marathon pace.
• Long runs are on Saturdays with training runs on Mondays and Wednesdays and fast runs on Fridays.
• I will continue doing the Circuit Blast class at the Y on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is also in the “speedwork” category.
• I am hoping that I will be able to join the East Nasties for some of my Wednesday runs and the Nashville Striders for some of the long runs on Saturdays.

Last year I “finished” the Country Music Marathon; this year I am really going to run it. I am not sure where my potential is, but I am running my “race pace” runs at a speed that would qualify for Boston.

It seems like a great way to raise the visibility of what is happening in New Orleans’ growing economy as well as to help New Orleans entrepreneurs to be more connected to like-minded communities around the country.

I am going to apply.

Read this article from Forbes

This raised the question, did I want to keep jaxn.org anymore?

After contemplating it for a week or two (i.e. procrastinating), I decided that I did want to keep this site. I moved it to Media Temple and used their SiteMover service to restore from an old backup that I had laying around. I mean, where else on the internet can people try to sell their worthless ideas or share their fear of the grim reaper.

So, now that I have committed to keep this site going, I should probably write more

I am going to qualify for the Boston Marathon.

For those that don’t know, that is a common, but challenging goal for distance runners. The qualifying times vary each year and are based on the age of the runner. For me, this means that I will run a marathon in less than 3:05:00. That is 26.2 miles at about 7 minutes per mile. When I started running again this past January, I couldn’t run a single mile in 7 minutes. Now I am training to run 26.2 of them in a row.

I have added a new fitness category to this site to collect the updates on this progress as well as my geekier thoughts on the subject (quantified self, KPIs of marathon training, progress by the numbers, etc).