Half-Marathon
Sorry I’ve been MIA again! Work has been crazy, we have a huge training roll-out that started this week and I’ve been working on that like a mad woman. I’ve done all of my part on it, but now I’m waiting on other people to meet their deadline that was due on November 26th. I leave for almost three weeks on vacation to England next Wednesday, so now I’m in a holding pattern waiting.
The St. Jude Half-Marathon was this weekend and was fantastic! I was in a wreck about three weeks ago and had whiplash and I thought that may affect my running, but I only had to take a few days off and then I was back on schedule. My mom and I were concerned with the cold and wind, but it turned out to be fine once we got going. Mile three was going down-hill on Beale Street which is covered with cobblestones and is uneven. I tripped! But luckily I caught myself before I fell down. A guy ran by and said “That was close!” I would have been so disappointed in myself if I had been hurt and not been able to finish. I finally hit my groove around mile four and it became actually enjoyable! We follow Jeff Galloway’s running method and run for five minutes and walk for one minute to recover. Our five minute intervals flew by.
At mile eleven, I started to feel some stiffness but nothing that bad. I finished the race by sprinting the last tenth of a mile. A lady and I actually raced to the finish, she saw me pacing her and sped up and we ran together, laughing about it. I ended up with a time of 2:42:15, which is almost 40 minutes faster than my time in 2005! Even better than that was our pacing, our first half of the race our pace was 12:21 and the second half was 12:24. That is very good for us, as usually we slow down a lot near the end, but we kept almost the same pace the entire race!
For the rest of December, I’m just doing easy runs; I’ll do two 5k runs during the week and a long run of 5 miles on the weekend. At least that’s my plan, but it may need to be adjusted when I get to England and don’t have a treadmill and have to run in the cold!
In January, we will start training for the Nashville half-marathon in April. We are going to make a weekend trip out of it, it should be really fun. The Nashville race is really hilly, so it’ll be a different challenge than the Memphis course.
I’m also down to my lowest weight in at least three years! Yay! I’m hoping I can keep it up. I know I owe it all to the running.
I will definitely be doing the St. Jude half next year! I am considering the Country Music Half, so I may have questions later about the training group you trained with...I may do that to challenge me to improve for my next half.
