@mF much thanks - although now I'm already starting to think maybe what I really want to do is a 50km...
@shaz brings up a point and here is a Public Service Announcement that I would not recommend biking to endurance events, at least if you care primarily about your time. You will run faster than I did. I mean, you could assistant coach the local high school cross country team for one season and have more datapoints than I'll ever have, so this is entirely based on what I've heard or read, but my received wisdom here is that you should move as little as possible, even in the three or so days leading up to an event and certainly the morning of consume as little glycogen as possible and with these endurance distances use the first miles of the race to warm up.
I will say though that there is something I especially like about biking at o'dark:00 (when they schedule these races) and I have noticed it does do something for me in terms of calming pre-race jitters. I've been fortunate enough to be close enough to bike, walk, and maybe a bus partway once-don't remember, to my races [
the harder I lifestyle-design, the luckier I get] and so really the reason behind my decision was some stubborn insistence to plant a flag that, ERE 1.0 style (I mean 1.0 as in before we all bought cars), you can lead a good life without a car. Although I acknowledge waking up at 6am to run 26 miles is not obviously a component of a good life and would want to be careful not to give the idea that early retirement is so uneventful, even a forced march might sound fun.
@Scott 2, I am precautionarily concerned with foot health and my early hopes that at least half my running would be on trail or off-asphalt anyway didn't really materialize (maybe 20%, largely due to my focus on pacing and running while dark) and while Xero shoes should probably buy banner ads on this thread, 'serious' runners look at my shoes and make comments (e.g. "minimalist? that's so like 10 years ago" which it is) like I'm showing up at the track meet in Onitsuka Tigers or something, and my reading of PubMed (where there has been a recent spate of work on minimalist shoes especially versus super shoes) is tepid at best. I wouldn't change anything in the middle of a season, but now would like to experiment with mixing in shoes with more cushioning to address the excessive road running, zero drop to differ biomechanically as little as possible from my minimalist preference, and a wide toe box to accomodate hobbit feet. I am thankful technically and maybe sensually, for the roadfeel of minimalist shoes, especially running in the dark, and regret losing that.
As to running faster, I hesitate with the super shoes. I don't know why I find it so impossible to just talk about running when we talk about running, but just to briefly bring up Epictetus and analogize from the
Enchiridion: if I have a fast horse, should I be proud or should the horse? Am I fast, or are the Nike designers? What's your frame of reference for your time? For instance, say I go over to the United Airlines Rhapsody in Blue tunnel at O'Hare and start doing laps on the moving walkway between terminals B & C and granted chances are that I will probably be promptly tackled by TSA although have you seen those guys?
Promptly? A little concourse-parkour and I think I could get a 5 or 10km out before they caught me, but supposing I made it 26 miles with a team of undermotivated overweighted government employees chasing after me, who let's recall are in fact armed so unless your rules of engagement-parkour is very strong I strongly recommend this even less than biking to a race start, and suppose I break 3 hours, did I just run a 2:50:00 marathon or did I run a 3:20:00 on a moving walkway?
I get that the demarcation between tool (objectified techne) and body can be fuzzier than we like to think (no actually that's just what you type on a keyboard: a tool is what you throw across the garage and your body is what meanwhile drips blood on the floor).
So maybe I get that technology improvements are part of the game and even I wouldn't show up at a local Century ride with a 50-year old Peugeot (when it comes to cycling, the centaur is out of the barn on that one) but something I thought I liked about running is that it's not about the shoes. But if you get 5-10 minutes, it kinda is, right? Table stakes. And if I'm trying to come in at a certain percentile of racers, that threshold is going to shift as more people start using them, and here is the downside of being an amateur athlete versus a professional one where we're all hemming and hawing whether to keep wearing shoes from 10 years ago and meanwhile a professional's decision tree looks like:
"Does it make me faster? If yes, use." whereas I'm off reading the Enchiridion when I should be training.
so this has actually been helpful to me to think through as I think where I am coming out on this one anyway is to remember my motivation which is fitness, primarily aerobic, (the BQ is just a metric) and also that I am trying to build a satisficing habit of qualifying for the Boston Marathon, not acquire a maximized achievement of doing it in my best possible time(in which case it would be appropriate to "throw everything and the kitchen sink at it", or "consume your seedcorn").
And so I will rank my potential enhancements by their contribution to overall fitness and health and take the first few. Meaning this coming year, I can benefit from still building my aerobic base (I am just coming up on 2 years in), bumping up my training paces 10-15s, and steeper hill sprints. If all that doesn't work and I am an eternal +1, I can consider adding more miles, proper nutrition/fueling, finding a downhill course, being carried to the race like some Raj of India, and finally: wearing super shoes. I would've said and finally: "cheat", but is it worth cheating, an amateur race where even if I did barely qualify for Boston I don't think I'd even go. Why go all that way to show up at a race I'm virtually guaranteed to be last?
The "eternal +1". It wouldn't be the worst epitaph:
Here lies ebast
+1.