Better late than never

I always told myself if I ever ran a marathon I would do it with the intention of getting into the best shape of my life and placing as high as possible. I probably should have started training for the St. George Marathon a little earlier if I was going to make good on that promise. But this makes for a good experiment: can someone who's as out of shape as I am get decent results with only 16 weeks to prepare? I should clarify what I consider decent as that is highly subjective.

Here's my personal grading scale:

F - Did not finish
D - finish > 3:10:00
C - finish < 3:10:00
B - finish < 3:00:00
A - finish < 2:50:00

With only 16 weeks to train and this being my first attempt at a marathon I would probably be pretty happy with a C as that would qualify for the Boston Marathon. That being said, I wouldn't have put the A category there if I didn't think it was possible, and that's the goal for which I will be training.

The purpose of this blog is simply to document the training process and results of the marathon. I hope to post a plan for the coming week and results for the previous week every Sunday, as well as other random thoughts at various times. Ideally I will also have a couple of 10k races and a half marathon before St. George rolls around, but I haven't really looked into what's available so we'll see how that goes...

OK, next post I will give a meta-view of what my training will look like for the next 16 weeks.