Half marathon training – Week 8 – Another week in the bank

Posted by Cecilia on Thursday, March 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

In the final few weeks of training my program specified that I should drop my speedwork pace down to 10K pace. So for my 1000m intervals on Tuesday I was aiming to go at 7:56 min/mile (4:56 for 1000m) which is my theoretical 10K pace based on a 1:49:59 half marathon time. Check out those intervals in the table below. Talk about consistency! It helps that I can monitor my pace on my Garmin a few times during each interval but those are still some awesome splits for me.

This Thursday I feel I redeemed myself from the previous week. On Thursday of Week 7 the weather was bad and I wimped out and converted a 8mi tempo run into a 6mi easy run. This Thursday I awoke to bad weather again. This time it was (1) dark, (2) cold and (3) raining very hard. I have a rule. I will run in any two of those things but I will not run in all three! So I postponed my morning run to the after work when I knew that it at least be light out. Surprisingly everything worked out and I got the hard tempo run in. Success!

On Saturday I did a race simulation long run and it pretty much kicked my butt. I tried very hard during the first six miles to keep my pace very easy. Given my heart rate I think I achieve that. Then I was aiming to run around 9:00 min/mile for the last six miles. I probably would have been much closer to that if it hadn’t been for the mile 11 which came in at 9:46. I have two of reasons/excuses for this (1) I had to stop my watch and restart at a traffic light which killed my flow and (2) there were a couple moderate hills on the route which slowed me down. Of course that’s kind of irrelevant but at least I got it done.

So that’s another week of training in the bank. Not overly exciting, I know, but I’m putting in the effort and I’m hopeful that I’ll have a good result in my upcoming half!

02/03 - Rest day
03/03 6.5 mi Speedwork: 6x1000m in 4:55/4:55/4:55/4:50/4:56/4:55 (1:14)
04/03 XT 55 min on elliptical plus weights
05/03 6.0 mi Tempo run (hard): 4mi @ 8:22/8:22/8:19/8:07
06/03 - Rest day
07/03 12.0 mi Race-sim long run: 1-6 avg 154 bpm, 10:59 min/mile;
7-12 avg 175 bpm, 9:10 min/mile
08/03 4.0 mi Recovery run: avg 156 bpm, 11:05 min/mile
Total 28.5 mi YTD: 258.5 miles

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