Half-marathon training – Week 4 – Step back week, 10K tomorrow

This week was nice and easy. After 3 weeks of long runs, tempo runs and speedwork it was time to take a step back week. This is the first Saturday in a long time that I haven’t done a long run. I have to admit that I was a little without purpose when I woke up this morning! However the inactivity will help me rest up for the 10K race I’m doing tomorrow morning.

Earlier this week I picked up my bib, chip and race t-shirt. Mom, I’m sure you’ll want to borrow the shirt because it’s bright purple and on the back it says “Go Dawgs.” The forecast is calling for perfect running weather tomorrow morning: sunny and 6C at 9am. I am so relieved not to be running in the rain! I’ve decided to adopt the habit of setting 3 goals for my race (#1 a minimum goal, #2 a realistic goal and #3 an optimal goal) so here they are for this race:

Goal #1: Finish my first 10K (a PB for sure) and enjoy running though campus because it’s ridiculously beautiful in the fall.

Goal #2: Keep up HMP for the first 4 miles of the race, remember this race is really a paced training run.

Goal #3: Pick up the pack for the last 2.2 miles and finish strong.

I’ll post a race report tomorrow afternoon…

Looking forward to mile 4 and not to mile 8

The half-marathon is 40 days from today. 40 days! In honour of this event I spent some time surfing the marathon website. I’m now on the list of official registrants which is good. So far I’m the only Cecilia. I also discovered the colour coded elevation map.

“The Course elevation is moderately hilly starting at approximately 100ft. dipping at the low to 40ft, and topping out at the 200ft level.”

Yea, moderately hilly. Based on the map, here’s my mile by mile breakdown on the half-marathon course along with my own Easy/Medium/Hard rating for each mile. Realistically I know there won’t be any easy miles but it’s all relative.

In a few weeks I’m planning on doing a training run along the course. Well, the part of the course that isn’t downtown and isn’t on I-90! I’ll get to train on approximately the last 8.5 miles of the course. I think this will be a big help especially since that includes most of the “Hard” miles.

Half-marathon training – Week 3 – Too fast?

[14/10] I’ll post more on my week of training tomorrow but until then check out this movie trailer. It totally makes me want to run a marathon in 2007.

[15/10] This was a decent week of training. Really there’s not much to report. My 8 miler went quite well even if I did run it a little faster than intended. Since when is that a problem? Earlier this week I was having a little trouble with my feet. Just some soreness in my heel and arch. However, icing, taping and stretching seems to be doing the trick. I just have to keep it all up even though the pain is gone!

Next week is a step back week (only 14 miles) which ends in the 10K Dawg Dash race on Sunday. Last year the 5K Dawg Dash was my first ever race so I guess this will be a sort of anniversary for me. My current plan for the race is to do the first 4 miles at my target half-marathon pace (HMP) of 9:00 min/mile. Then for the last 2.2 miles I’ll run how I feel, hopefully that will mean either picking up the pace or maintaining it. I’ve never run a 10K before so I’m sure it will be an interesting experience.

Half-marathon training – Week 2 – Check out Chasing Kimbia

[10/10] This past week was a pretty good training week. I spent the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend in Victoria and Vancouver which meant working my training in around various other events. It wasn’t really a problem though especially since some of those events counted as cross training. More on the weekend is coming up in another post.

The other excitment of last week was the discovery of the website Chasing Kimbia. The description on the website says it best …

Follow the lifestyle and training of a small group of elite marathoners as they prepare for the Chicago and New York City marathons. Managed by KIMbia Athletics and sponsored by New Balance, these athletes have left their families in Kenya and Tanzania to train together and live together in Boulder, Colorado. This is your backstage pass to a behind the scenes view on their training & lifestyle during the build-up.

I’d encourage you to check it out. I am totally addicted.

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

[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!

Half-marathon training – Week 0 – Here we go again …

The Seattle Half Marathon is 9 weeks from today. Ideally, I would have started training about a month ago but my great European vacation got in the way of that. Instead I started training this past week in what I called “Week 0″ of my training program. This week was all about getting back into running, ignoring pace and assessing my current state of fitness. I have certainly lost some fitness over the past month but I think I can whip myself back into good form over the next 9 weeks.

In the spirit of jumping in headfirst I’ve mailed in my registration for both the half-marathon and for the 10K Dawg Dash which I’m going to use as a tune-up race. I also bought a new pair of running shoes yesterday. I decided that having two pairs to alternate between was going to be necessary in the rainy Seattle autumn. Now that I’ve made the monetary commitment I’m definitely motivated to make the mental, physical and nutritional commitments! My goal is to run a sub 2 hour half-marathon. I’d really like to make that happen.