They claim this was taken at mile five, but I don't remember seeing a photographer at mile five. The only one I saw on the course was just after mile 12, when I started booking it. And that wall behind me, and the brightness (I was still in shade at mile five), also lead me to believe they got the placement of the photographer wrong.
I was also curious what my time in this race would have (theoretically) been had the weather been perfect (perfect for me being defined as about 60 degrees or cooler with overcast skies). And lo and behold! I found a calculator online that does just that. It's from a coaching company called Premier Coaching and you get to it here.
I had to fool around with it some, as when you enter a time it plugs it in as if you ran that time in the ideal conditions, and the directions about subtracting were confusing. So I just entered times until I got mine to show up under 85 degrees (finish temp yesterday was 86, so I rounded down). Here's what it came up with:
1:52:19!
I'm very happy about that. And since my training runs are mostly done at 5:30 a.m., when temperatures here in Colorado are much closer to the ideal, and since the marathon I'm training for (Top of Utah) is mostly downhill and won't be run at 86 degrees, I used that adjusted time to compute my new training paces using the McMillan Running calculator.
Not sure if this would be kosher if I had a real coach, but since I don't, I'm going with my own gut and how I felt during the race (which was great). Using that time, the calculator predicts a marathon finish of 3:56:53. That's not fast enough for Boston, but it's a nine-minute improvement over what my Bolder Boulder time predicted.
Getting there, getting there.....and a girl can (and will) dream!
