I want to be upbeat, but I also want to be honest with myself, and with her. She knows what she can do. I also know that her last Marathon run was in the 6:30 range, and that's a straight Marathon, no races in the days immediately preceding the race.
She's doing the Galloway training, and it's going well. She's been on point with the runs and the directions. Even so, the Galloway directions, themselves, state that all he's trying to accomplish with the training is completing all four races without going down.
She wants to finish, and I'm encouraging her as much as I can. I also know she's never run this much in her life, and it's a challenge. That's why it's called The Dopey Challenge, right? Finishing this would mean a lot to her, but I'm not going to go "you'll finish the marathon in 4 hours!" That's not realistic, that's not me.
You know when
@DopeyBadger did his Milwaukee Marathon last week, and he did that little contest on predicting his finishing time? I honestly felt awful that I posted the highest prediction time. I looked at his data, crunched a few quick numbers, and that time is what I came with. I didn't want to be right, not at all. He wanted to run a sub 3:00 Marathon, and I was hoping that he would. I thought someone would come over me, maybe to be funny, but no one did.
Everyone has different goals. Finishing a marathon, just finishing, is an accomplishment a vast majority of people can't say they've done. I haven't, and I know I never will. I have physical limitations that can't ever let me see that goal. My girl has physical limitations, as well, but she tries really hard to the overcome the ones she can. There are some she can't, and it is what it is. Before anyone criticizes that we can, just that we won't, I never said won't.
Yes, she and I joke about some things all the time, and it seems some of those jokes don't translate well on here, and I apologize for that. Our senses of humor are rather dry, and, yes, there are people who don't like it, and that's fine.
Anyway, I don't want to derail this thread anymore, I've felt I've done too much derailing, already.