Half-Marathon & Summer

When I last left off I had just started getting back into the swing of things, and my Half-Marathon was on the horizon. Well, the training has been going well. I managed 44 miles the week of the last post, 49.6 miles the following week, and 33.6 miles last week. Last week had me taking off one day early in the week to fix a sore IT band, and then I voluntarily took off the Sunday after my Half, so that week is lower with good reason...

The half went about as well as I could have hoped for. I set out with the goal of breaking 1:30. In a worst case scenario I hoped to at least PR (1:31.high) and under best case scenario I hoped to run under 1:28, maybe getting close to the theoretical 1:25 I could run based on my fitness a few months back. To go for these goals I decided I would start out pretty conservatively, (6:4x min/min) and see how I felt from there. I did just that, and my splits went as follows:

6:38

6:40

6:32

6:37

6:50

6:38

6:46

6:47

6:35

6:53

7:14

7:15

6:58

0:54 (.16mi)

1:29:15

So I definitely died a bit towards the end, and if it hadn't been for Steve Dobson coming up beside be with around 400m to go I probably would have finished 15-20 seconds slower. But I did meet my intermediate goal, and I am happy with the race. I was hardly sore at all, save the bottoms of my feet (I ran in Lunaracers).

Coming off the race I feel as strong as ever, I took Sunday off because the bottoms of my feet were too sore to run, although my legs felt fine. Yesterday I set out to do an easy 6, but I ended up feeling great so I did around 7.7. I also felt great today and so I used my lack of a final to get in an easy 11mi run.

This run was interesting because it's the first long-ish run I have done in the heat and I brought my new running water bottle along. The water bottle was alright, but it will take some getting used to. The heat was pretty bad though (73 and sunny, no shade). The next few days will be busy so I'm glad I got a lot of milage in already this week and I am looking forward to summer, so overall I am feeling good and optimistic! Steamtown Marathon here we come!

Quote of the day:

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T.S. Eliot