AM - 6 miles, easy. PM - 2 miles even easier. Shake out jog from Scott's house to the mouth of Providence Canyon and back.
TOU 1/2 tomorrow morning. Last year my goals were to run 1:05-something and win the race. I met one of those objectives. So I think I'll keep the targets the same for this time around. Here are some pre-race thoughts that I want to get down now, so my race report isn't 10 pages long... and some of this is for my own benefit - it helps me look at things objectively.
My training has been quite a bit different this summer than in 2011. Last summer I was doing consistent speed workouts throughout July/August, raced a decent amount, and came into TOU 1/2 tapered and sharp. I didn't have an "A+" day, and Paul ran a really nice race to beat me soundly, but it was still a great cap to the summer and launched me on the path to run 1:05:45 at Long Beach in October. [2011 TOU 1/2 Report] This summer I've basically just been logging lots of miles, kept things very unstructured for most of the time, having fun and not thinking too hard about running - rather than think about it - I've just been doing it, listening to what the body says feels right. I think I accomplished what I set out to do during these months. Mentally and physically I feel really good. Only in the past 2-3 weeks has some real intensity been added back into the mix. I was looking over my log last night... while I knew that my overall volume of running has been higher this summer, I didn't quite realize the extent of what I've done recently - 145, 160, 156, 158, 155 the last 5 weeks (I don't feel like I've been running that much, though!). My overall volume is up ~65% in the 10 days before the race this year compared to last year, so not much of a taper this year (but that is somewhat by design, as the TOU Marathon is only 3 weeks away and I can't really cut back too much yet)...  Looking at those numbers got me curious about how much volume I did leading up to other "target" half-marathons (and I threw in the PHX 15K because that was my competitive tune-up race before Boston). Clearly, I cut back a lot more leading up to 2011 TOU 1/2, Long Beach, and Duluth... This last month leading up to tomorrow has been most similar (again, in terms of volume) to the Phoenix race, where I ran really well (one of my top races all-time), but still about 10-15% higher. Luckily I have a very extravagant spreadsheet with lots of data that pumps out all kinds of tables and graphs with only a few clicks...  In terms of workouts - the thing I love about the track is that it tells you exactly where you stand and it gives me a very good idea of what to expect in races. Well, I've stayed off the track the entire summer (by design) and my road workouts have been on different routes than I've used in the past (again, by design). I've sort of just mixed most of them into my run commuting back and forth from work. So I have no predicted-performance "indicators" - I'm just going to go out tomorrow, run as fast as I can, and see what happens. It will be an interesting case study (n=1) to see what the results of this kind of training (ie. super-high volume, even by my standards, not much cut-back this week, and low-key approach to the workouts over the past month in general) end up being for this half-marathon, and how my performance shapes up compared to last year. I think its perfectly reasonable to expect to be under 50 minutes at ten miles, but as everyone who has run this course knows, the difference between a good and great race at TOU 1/2 is how you run miles 11 and 12. In any case, the marathon in 3 weeks is my BIG target, and tomorrow's run will give me the best idea of what kind of time I should be targeting. | 
