It was not meant to be.  I’m on Christmas vacation and for once, I had enough time.  I felt pretty good and I wanted to be able to grab the 100 bonus points in the Nonathlon.  But things just didn’t work out to plan.

I looked up my PB and it was a 1:59.1 pace. Ouch.  That seemed hard, but I was game.  I took off at 1:59 and within 5K I realized it was too fast for me.  I pushed on to my first water break, at 12192m. I guzzled down some water and got going again, but this time I held it to about a 2:03 pace.  This was much better.  My HR stayed in better control and I was a lot more comfortable.  At least I was for the next 12 minutes or so.  At that point I got a call from my car insurance people.  It’s a long story, but I needed to handle a problem right away with a few phone calls.  It all took about 15 minutes.

I just left the clock running on the marathon.  When I pulled again, it showed a projected time of 3:00:00, and an average pace of about 2:30.  What a depressing sight.  But I pushed on.  For about 5 minutes.  That’s when my iphone spontaneously stopped playing music.  I played around a bit and determined that it was the headphones, ran and got another pair, and got back on the erg.

Now the projected finish was above 3:08:00.  And I just started to lose interest.  At this point, I had rowed 17 or 18km.  I rowed to 20km, had a quick drink and continued.  When I got to 25km, I decided that I’d had enough.  I had some Christmas shopping to do and some other errands, and the thought of grinding away for another hour was not at all interesting to me.

Maybe, I’ll give it a go in a couple weeks if I have a marathon sized hole in my schedule.

I guess it’s really just another steady state training day.