Half-marathon training – Week 1 – Course water station (over)analysis

25/09	–	Rest day
26/09	3 miles	Slow & easy
27/09	XT	30 min swimming laps
28/09	5 miles	Tempo run, 3m @ 8:48 min/mile, felt good to run hard
29/09	–	Rest day
30/09	7 miles	Long run @ 10:10 min/mile, felt great and I hit my target pace on the nose!
01/10	XT	45 min on the eliptical machine + weights
Total	15 miles	YTD: 551 miles

[01/10] I had a great 7 mile “long run” yesterday. I felt strong the whole time and really enjoyed being outside and running in the cool crisp fall weather. I decided to run by feel instead of constantly monitoring my pace. This worked out well. I clocked my total time and it turns out I hit my average target pace of 10:10 min/mile right on the nose! As a side note, my grocery bill came to exactly $30.00 on Friday so I must be on some sort of round number kick.

Now that the long runs have started I feel like the training has actually begun. One of my projects for the weekend has been (over)analysing my half-marathon hydration strategy. I believe it’s important to think about this now because I want to use the same strategy during my training.

So … according to the race website there are supposed to be 10 water/aid stations on the half-marathon course. From looking at the map I think they’re counting the start/finish stop twice. Further, because of the way the full and half courses split and then merge back together 2 water stations end up being less than a mile apart for the half marathoners. Finally there’s a water station less than a mile from the finish line that I hopefully I won’t need to stop at. So that leaves 6 water stations that I will probably use in addition to the water bottle I will carry myself. The stops average out to being about every second mile. My plan is to take one minute walking breaks at each water station. I’ll also probably take gels at the stops around miles 4 and 8.

So my training hydration strategy is to take a water/walk break every 20 minutes or so. As it happens, this is pretty much exactly what I did yesterday.

[27/09] In hindsight, perhaps going from almost 4 weeks of vacation to running 17 miles last week was a bit much. I think my feet are suffering from the huge increase in impact. They’re fine really, just a bit sore. In any case I’ve decided to decrease my running days down to 3 this week and add 2 days of low or non-impact cross training. This morning I swam. Historically, I’ve found that if I arrive at the pool at around 8:30am most of the hard core swimmers are gone and the lanes aren’t too busy. I thought that today being the first day of classes might mess with this strategy but things worked out and I was able to get in 30 minutes of almost entirely uninterrupted lap swimming this morning. I can tell my shoulders and arms are going to be sore tomorrow. I haven’t used those muscles in a while!