April racing, racing schedule, training

I'm going to start putting weekly training up again since I'm upping my mileage again this coming week for the fairly difficult summer racing schedule I've decided on:
1.Mohican Trail 100 Mile Run, mid-late June
2. Around the Lake 12 hour run, mid-late July (hoping for at least 75 miles, but the 78.6 mile triple-marathon would be really nice)
3. Cascade Crest Classic 100 Mile Run, late-August
I'm debating which marathon I'm going to run in the fall, but I'm leaning towards anything in late-October into any time in November. NYC is fairly appealing, especially since my 2:53 at Boston automatically qualifies me without making me sit through the lottery, but the price-tag on that one (including airfare from Salt Lake to NYC) is pretty ridiculous, so I'm still not sure. I have to decide within a few days since registration closes on May 1st.

As for a summary of my April racing, I had:
American River 50 Mile Run: 7:44:57 (9:17/mile). My goal was really just to break 8, though I secretly kind of wanted to be under 9/mile. I was pretty happy with my time since the course wasn't quite as easy as I expected, though. I'm pretty sure I have a lot more potential waiting to be tapped in the 50 and I think that in a good fast 50 mile road race (this was half fast roads, half slow trails), I might eventually be able to drop to mid 6's or even faster.

Boston Marathon: 2:53:46 (6:37/mile). My goal was officially to break 2:55, so I was pretty happy. I also wanted negative splits, but I didn't quite hit that. My 2nd half running pace was slightly faster, but I ended up going 86:33, 87:13, only because I lost 80 seconds in the bathroom at mile 16. Overall, I'm still happy with it, though I'm sure the time will continue to fall. My semi-long term goal will be to get this down to sub-6/mile, hopefully by 2011 and I think it should definitely be doable.

Pike's Peek 10k: 35:29 (5:42/mile). I thought this was pretty horrible performance for me... I was shooting for mid-33's, but everything went wrong. I wanted to do a 17-minute first 5k and speed up to a mid-16s 5k in the 2nd half, but I ended up doing 17:10, 18:19. My quads are apparently not 100% after Boston yet and I think I now realize why a fair number of more experienced runners were telling me this was a terrible idea. I mentally wasn't in this one at all; I accidentally got directions to the finish rather than the start, so I ended up making it to the start about a minute before the race started (having to run the last 3/4 of a mile in 4 minutes due to closed roads), giving me just enough time to sprint to packet pickup, pin on my bib with a single pin, and jam my chip in my shoe without tying it down. I was still winded as the gun went off and I never felt good throughout the race. The first 5k in 17:10 was only 10 seconds off what I wanted, but I knew pretty much from a mile in that things didn't feel as good as they should've. I guess this is a lesson learned about racing anything, especially speedy stuff, the same week as a big important marathon... On the up side, I have a lot of room to improve, but this was a pretty disappointing 10k debut for me...

As for my near future training, I'm going to be upping the mileage a lot in the next week or 2 and trying to run as much as possible over the next 6 or 7 weeks. I'm going to try to get one really massive run in most weekends since I've found those trainers to be the best for ultras.

My training ought to set me up very well for a late-fall marathon since I'll have about 4 months of huge base training before focusing on speed for about 2 months before running a marathon. I'll definitely be shooting for a sub 2:50 in the fall and if my training goes well, I might even shoot for a 2:45, which I think could be possible given very good training.