Half marathon training – Week 7 – Shoe hierarchy

I have now reached the half way point in my training for the Royal Victoria half marathon. Only seven more weeks to go! I finally registered for the race this week. My transportation to and from Victoria is also now booked. I’ve been studying the course map and reading the webpage to collect all the data I can. The most important thing I’ve learned so far is that, as is typical of Canadian races, the course will be marked each kilometer and every 5 miles. Even though I’ll have my Garmin I’m thinking about converting to kilometer pacing for this race. A 1:59:55 half marathon is equivalent to a pace of 5:41 min/km.

In other news, I think it’s time to retire my second pair of Brooks Adrenaline GTS 6s. I’ve had this pair since January but since I always have 2-3 pairs of shoes in rotation they’re only at 342.5 miles. In this case that’s 59:08.18 hours of running! I was hoping to get 350-400 miles on them but they seemed pretty flat on Saturday’s long run so it’s time for them to be demoted down a rank in my shoe hierarchy:

1. Shoes being broken/saved in for racing
2. Shoes being used for everyday training
3. There are two possible paths here:
   1. Shoes that stay in my locker at the gym for use in cross training
   2. Shoes to be used as street shoes
4. Shoes that live in Ottawa for use at the cottage or mowing the lawn

Half marathon training – Week 6 – Double digits!

On Saturday I did my first double digit mile run since the marathon. I set out intending to do the 9 miles on my schedule but less than a mile into the run my Garmin ran out of battery power. I had recharged it on Wednesday in Victoria but I think it must have accidentally turned on in my luggage on the boat back to Seattle and drained the battery. I was planning to do a 4.5 mile out and back course but without the Garmin I didn’t know where the turn around would be so instead I decided to do my tried and true 10 mile course. I did the run by feel without any knowledge of my pace or specific timing for walk/water/gel breaks. I’m too type A to do this every week but it’s nice every once in a while.

When I did the Vancouver half marathon last year my longest training runs were two 10 milers in the two week preceding the race. For the Seattle half marathon I did an 11.5 miler two weeks before the race. I’ve now done a 10 miler a full 8 weeks before the race. I am very excited about this. Granted 1.5 of those 8 weeks will be mostly lost to a short trip to Europe I have planned with my mother. Still I feel pretty good about where my weekly and long run mileage is right now. I feel like I have a lot of room for improvement in the speed department, especially if I want to beat 1:59:56, but hopefully that will come with more time and training.

Half marathon training – Week 5 – Short and quick

This weekly update is a little late because as you can see from above I’ve been out of town since Thursday. In fact I am currently in a cafe in Victoria so I’m just going to post the table and let it speak for itself. I will say one thing though, check out the progressively faster splits I pulled off during the four tempo miles last Wednesday!

Half marathon training – Week 4 – Tune up race tomorrow

This week was supposed to be a step back week but by the end of it I will have done the exact same mileage as last week. Oops. I didn’t do any speedwork or tempo runs though so in that way it has been an easy week. I did three easy 5 milers this week at a slightly faster than normal training pace. I like to think of the 5 miler as a cornerstone of my training. It’s a very manegable distance. It takes less than an hour to do and I can run it on an empty stomach first thing in the morning. In other words, not a lot of planning has to go into knocking out a 5-miler. I like that.

I have a very different sort of 5 miler coming up tomorrow though. I’m running the Torchlight Run 8K. I did this race last year as an “A” race in a very speedy time of 40:53. I don’t think I can pull that off this again this year so I’ve chosed to use the race as a tune up race. My goal is to run at my goal half marathon race pace. That means somewhere between and 8:46 and 9:09 min/mile corresponding to half marathon times of 1:55:00 and 1:59:59, respectively. We’ll see how that goes. It will be a good way to guage where I’m at in my training. Stay tuned for a race report to be posted either tomorrow night or Sunday morning!

Half marathon training – Week 3 – Allison’s ankle surgery

The big event of this week, other than the release of Harry Potter #7, was my sister’s ankle surgery on Thursday. The women in my family all have loose ankles. Seriously, several times I’ve had a doctor check my ankles and then call in the residents so they can feel how loose they are! Allison has sprained her ankle so many times that she had bone chips that needed to be removed and some ligaments that needed tightening. I drove up to Vancouver on Wednesday and spent the rest of the week up there with her. She was a superstar and really toughed it out and dealt with the pain and discomfort. I’m sure it will all be worth it if she can ski this winter!

I ran twice while I was up in Vancouver. The weather was really funny this weekend. It rained pretty steadily like it does in the winter but it was still sort of warm and even a little humid. If it hadn’t been for the humidity it would have been perfect running weather but it was still much much better than the hot, sunny weather we’ve been having. My 8 miler on Saturday was the first run I’ve done since the marathon that actually felt easy. I was just rolling along at a comfortable pace and it felt great. I need more long runs like that!

I finally hit 20 miles in a week. This isn’t big mileage but it’s still nice to be back at this level!

Half marathon training – Week 2 – Heat wave

It’s been a hot hot week in Seattle. It reached over 30C on both Tuesday and Wednesday. I was out running by 6:15am on both days but even at that time it was about 20C. So far I’ve been able to handle the higher temperatures but I can definitely tell that running in the heat takes a little more out of me than usual. Needless to say I’ve been drinking about 4L of water a day and going through sunscreen at an alarming rate!

Now that I’m through week 2 I’m starting to get back into the training groove. That means consistently going to bed early (which is hard when it’s still quite warm in my room at 10pm and I want to keep reading one of the Harry Potters in preparation for the release of Book 7) and waking up early, even on the weekends. It also means brining enough healthy food with me to work/school that I don’t make a bad decision at the vending machine at around 3pm!

I spoke to my cousin Nic on Friday before he left Sunday for the RCMP Training Academy (aka Depot). That’s right, my cousin is going to be a mountie! Anyway, Nic and I got to talking about the fitness benchmarks he’s going to have to achieve during the 6 months at Depot including a 22 minute 5K! That’s pretty speedy but I have no doubt that with proper training he’ll be able to do it. I was pleased to see that my 5K PB is 4 seconds under the female standard of 24:00. I’m pretty sure the pull-ups and bench press would do me in though!

Half marathon training – Week 1 – 14 weeks to a new PB

Before I get into discussing my next round of training I want to give you a quick update on how my running has been going since the marathon. I took two full weeks off after the marathon and then I tried to slowly ease back into running. I donated blood three weeks ago and that didn’t do much to help my recovery. I honestly felt as thought I was running through syrup for the two weeks after donating. It was sort of like reverse blood doping! I only managed to get a total of 35.9 miles in during the month of June which brought my mileage for the first half of 2007 up to 560.4 miles. It’s nice to know I’m on pace to hit my goal of running 1000 miles this year.

This week I started fall half marathon training. I’m hoping to run both the Royal Victoria and Vancouver Fall Classic half marathons this year. My goal for Victoria is to set a new personal best (<1:59:56). I don't feel nearly as fit right now as I'd like to but I'm hoping that with 14 weeks of training I'll be able to whip myself into shape and achieve that goal. It feels good to be working towards something again. Here's how the first week of training shaped up.

I’m a little embarassed to even call my 6.2 mile run a “long run” but there it is. When I look at this week it seems as thought I didn’t do much but I know it fits into the larger training plan and I have to trust that the plan will get me where I need to be. As I did for the marathon, my new training program (pdf) is based on a Runner’s World SmartCoach program. I altered it to mesh with my weekly schedule, the tune-up races I plan to do, my travel schedule and my desire for patterns in mileage increases across the various types of runs. What can I say? I’m a mathematician and I like patterns!