I wanted to title this post “Bandera”. It’s the Bandera 100K. But it’s not Bandera. Not anymore. The rains from Thursday forced the event to be relocated 90 minutes West at Camp Eagle, along the Nueces River near Rocksprings. Meaning, I’ll have to wake up 90 minutes earlier than planned.

It’ll be more inconvenient for my crew than me. I expect a similar course, similar hills. Similar caliche soil that might clump onto my shoes if still wet enough tomorrow. And it appears to be about 5° cooler further west. Likely because the elevation is 1000 feet higher. But it will warm up into the 50°s. I’ll begin by wearing gloves but shouldn’t need a jacket, perhaps two shirts initially. The running vest serves as a jacket of sorts.

I typically blog a post before marathons, mostly to soothe my nerves, where I predict my pace. It’s easy to predict a range based on my conditioning, but of course so many things can go wrong with long distances that guessing correctly is partly luck. I don’t have any experience at 62 miles, nor this trail, so really hard to say, but I know what I want to run. I want to run under a 14 minute pace. 16 minutes would be more realistic and that might be my overall pace, but I imagine I’ll start out running a 12 minute pace for the first 15 miles or so. It’s hard for me to run slower than that unless the hills are tougher than I expect and I find myself walking more in the first loop.

I expect plenty of walking in the second loop. I hope not too much as I really want to finish before bed time. The sun will drop around 6pm and I hope to finish before 10pm, so I’ll be using the 800 lumen headlamp my pacer and daughter, Brittany, gifted me for Christmas for a good 4 hours. I’m comfortable running in the dark with a head lamp and I’ll be running so slowly by then that it won’t be a factor. I’ve printed out the chart below, an overly optimistic projection, for Brit to crew me with.

My Apple Watch SE won’t last more than 10 hours, even in low power mode, but I’ll be using it to track my heart rate. If I can refrain from too much running in zone 4 or 5, I should be able to keep my fueling and hydration in check. Really, unless those hills are a bugger, I should be mostly running in zone 2 which is a very comfortable pace. I don’t expect to ever come close to exceeding my lactate threshold. Heart rate zones are determined by your max heart rate, which is mostly determined by your age. I’ve tailored mine with my level of conditioning using the Karvonen method, which suggests my max might be as high as 170. Experience tells me though that if I breach 170, I might be experiencing A-Fib, especially if I instantly go from below 130 to 170. Which is why I intend to track that metric. I’m also doing it to make sure my cognitive abilities are such that I can read my watch and tell Brit my heart rate if she asks. If not, I should maybe consider a DNF.

You can track my progress here: http://edsresults.com/bandera24/