Training Update

In just twelve short weeks I'll be running in my fifth Marathon. Allergies, illness and life have negatively affected the early stages of my training. Now that two of those three things are in my rearview mirror (there's nothing that I can do about the third one) I feel that I'm good to go. Today I ran my first ever official half-marathon. Despite having not run a mile above seven in the past month, I went in with one goal and that was to finish in under two hours. I know two hours in half marathon really isn't anything special but the last three races of any distance that I've run, I've fallen well short of my target time. In order to finish under two hours, I knew that I had to keep my pace at around a nine minute mile throughout the race. Nine minutes feels really slow to me and my instinct was to crank it up a notch but I new if I did that I'd burn myself out as I have many times before. For much of the race I ran 8:40 splits. At mile 11 I hit a small wall but I regained my strength by last mile and cruised to the finish in a time 1:55:25. Not my best race by any means but a signal to me that I've still got something left.