P-9

59 degrees, sunshine and a girl on her scooter! What a great way to start your day. After dropping Eileen off at school I headed out with no route and no watch for an easy run of 5 miles or so. I was a little tight at the start but loosened up about a mile in and ran what I thought was an 8 min pace winding through the neighborhood streets. I was thinking about the Portland Marathon pace calculator that Jim found on line yesterday. It claims to take in to account the course profile and produce mile by mile splits for your goal time. It also asks for a recent race of any length and produces a predicted finish time for Portland. For my goal time, I plugged in 3:10:00. Then I plugged in several race times. The one I thought was most appropriate was the Zooma 1/2 marathon that I ran last February. It was on a hilly course near Bastrop not the blazing fast 3M course. Using my time of 1:29:04, the Portland Marathon predictor predicted a 3:07:17 and produced mile by mile splits for that time. I then used my IBM 10K time of 39:52 from last year and got a prediction of 3:06:58. All of that adds to my confidence level that my goal is within reach.