Half Marathon Training Starts Tomorrow

Tomorrow I start ten weeks of training for the Mercer Island Half Marathon. I’ve been meaning to do this race for a few years but this is the first year that I could guarantee in advance that I’d be in Seattle that weekend. I’ve decided to us the Ryan Hall Half Marathon Training Program featured in Runner’s World. I previously used the first five weeks of this program in training for the 2007 Fall Classic half marathon where I set my current personal best of 1:52:00.

Setting a new half marathon personal best is one of my goals of 2009. Actually what I’d really like to do is beat 1:50:00. I’m not sure that Mercer Island is the place to make that happen though. The course is rather hilly and I’m not coming into training with the greatest base. I’ve been running pretty consistently for the past three weeks (about 20 miles per week) but I haven’t done any speed work or tempo runs since before the marathon in November. We’ll see how it goes!