It turns out that I can't attend the Mad Moose Marathon because of a conference that weekend. So I decided to run the Edmonton Derby Marathon instead. It's a lovely course, almost perfectly flat, and I definitely want to do it again.

At this point in the season, I have been training continuously for seven months. So I shouldn't be surprised that my times keep getting better. But my performance during this race was beyond my expectations: on my way to getting a personal marathon best (3hr 2min), I also ran a personal best in the first 10k (38 min) and the first 21.1k (1hr 22min). My average pace up to the 30k mark was 4:00 min per km, something that I had not known I was capable of. In the end, however, the mileage and the heat (25 degrees C) caught up to me and I had to slow down. Still, I managed to finish in just over 3 hrs!

Heat is definitely an issue for me. For the last 10k of the race, I was getting goosebumps and shivers, definitely not a good sign on a warm and sunny day. After the race I could only eat half of the free lunch, and ten minutes later, I tossed that half down the toilet. Like all my little bouts of heat sickness, I was feeling right as rain a couple hours later. The puking is new, though: I haven't done that in a long time!

So, I need to do more afternoon runs in my training. My usual morning runs do not exercise my cooling systems hard enough. If I can find a way to beat the heat, then it is altogether possible that I could knock another ten minutes off of my marathon time.