Pacing...is it better left for when your teen misses curfew

My remarkably talented sisters comment on my first post started me thinking about the pacing game. Up until the last few years I never put  much thought into the whole pacing thing...it seemed to go against my whole "run for fun" philosophy...
My lack of a pacing plan was evident when I ran my first marathon, the Royal Victoria Marathon in 1997. I followed, and I use the term loosely, a Jeff Galloway training plan with a friend.  My goal was to finish, hopefully uninjured. Coming in just over 4:30 hours I felt proud of my accomplishment.  The question I asked was could I do better. I set my sites on the 2000 Vancouver Marathon with a goal to qualify for Boston.  I was doing barely any gym training, a lot of swimming as cross training, minimal core work, and running for time not distance.  I finished in just over 5 hours. 
When I ran Victoria again in 2008 after a long absence from distance running brought on by the birth  of my twins seven months after that 5 hour Marathon run in 2000 (top that for an excuse for a sluggish run), I finished in 4 hours 24 minutes.  This time I had been in the gym 3 times a week and trained with a plan and pace chart.  I still managed to mess up in the run.  With a split time of just under 2 hours I couldn't help getting swept away with the crowd, and the beautiful city and the adrenaline rush....rookie mistake ..came out too fast.
So to me the importance of pacing is clear.  But it is just one ingredient in the mix for setting your sites on a goal.  I watch as one of my sisters continuously sets new Personal Bests in the Half Marathon and my other sister who qualified for and ran Boston is always setting new goals, and I know that the pacing along with the cross training, core strengthening and nutrition are all important elements to succeed at improving my running.

And then I read Frances' blog and savour the venue from which she "runs from home", on an island where the pace is not set by cars but passenger ferries, where running is taken right back to where it should be...lace up your shoes and head out the door, keep your head up and take in the view, run by neighbours and smile and say hello, shout out compliments on their latest garden acquisition, or on days when you aren't feeling so neighbourly keep your head down until you are out of sight and do fartleks from tree to tree. 

The beauty of running is it doesn't really have to be anything we don't want it to be.  Pacing can just be what we do when the teenager hangs out past curfew.  And personal bests can just be the fact that the first thing we did when we rolled out of bed was thought about what a great day it was for a run. 
Blaze a Trail...:)