Picking a fall half marathon

I’ve now run three times since the marathon for a whopping total of 10 miles this week. Between going to a wedding in Idaho, playing in an ultimate tournament and attending a mock statistical conference, I’m going to spend the next few weeks doing short easy runs before I dive into … fall half marathon training! Woo hoo! You know you can’t wait to read all about it!

The first step is to pick a race. I’ve got it narrowed down to three choices:

  • Royal Victoria – Oct 7 (Canadian Thanksgiving weekend)
  • Vancouver Fall Classic – Nov 18 (weekend before US Thanksgiving)
  • UWMC Seattle – Nov 25 (US Thanksgiving weekend)
  • I did Seattle last year and since it’s over the US Thanksgiving weekend I feel as though a better usage of a four day weekend would be a trip to Victoria. Yes, regular trips to Victoria will be restarting in August! I’m actually leaning towards doing both Victoria and Vancouver if it’s possible. Victoria depends on any potential family Thanksgiving plans and Vancouver depends on my sister letting my crash at her place. It would be so great though because the start/finish line is walking distance from her apartment.

    Marathon graphs

    Here are my collection of graphs from the Ottawa marathon. The first has been posted before. I’ts my training mileage graph. I think it nicely shows the mileage progression and pattern of types of training runs I did over the course of 16 weeks. The second graph was created by the TrackRunner software directly from my Garmin data. You can clearly see the spikes in the blue pace line representing walk breaks. The big spike comes from the one porta potty break I took during mile 18. The green elevation line ranges from 150 feet to about 300 feet with no single hill over 100 feet. Compare that to the Kirkland half marathon whose elevation ranged from about 0 feet to 500 feet!

    The last graph was a lot of fun to make. I thought long and hard about the best way to visually represent my pace over the length of the course. A line graph or simple bar graph were obvious choices. Instead I went with a bar graph vertically centered at my average pace. This makes is very easy to see when I sped up and when I slowed down. I was pleased to see that the last 5.2 miles all came in below average. I’ll admit that the second order polynomial fit regression line might be taking things a step too far!

    2007 Ottawa marathon training - what actually happened

    Ottawa Marathon Graph

    Ottawa Marathon Pace Graph