Flying Pirate Half Marathon

My second half is now in the books, and it was a tough one.

My target goal was to finish around 2:15, and I thought that getting in at the 2 hour mark would be possible.  I had started doing a little bit of speed work, and had my first set of miles under the 9 minute mark. I was consistently hitting well under 10 when I focused on that.  My legs felt good through all of this, no aches or pains.  Then, last week, during my taper, it all went to hell.  The taper week plan was for just 2 runs, and to focus on pace, staying close to a 10 minute mile.  I was going to do 5 miles at this pace on Tuesday, then 4 miles on Thursday.  Tuesday went very well, then on Thursday, around mile 1.5, I started to feel stiffness in my left hamstring.  Then at 2 miles, it turned into an ache.  I cut off the run shortly after that.

My first thought was that I might have to cancel, but since the event was walker friendly, I decided to go ahead and make an attempt.  I got a compression wrap for my thigh, and used that all day Friday, iced the sore spot both Thursday and Friday evening, then wrapped again for the drive to the Outer Banks on Saturday.  By Saturday evening, it was feeling almost normal.

My target goal being scuttled, I settled on trying for a 3 hour finish if I was able to do a run/walk combination, and if not that, just walking the whole way.  I set my Garmin for quarter mile laps, and started with the decision to slow run each quarter mile followed by a 60 second walk.  That went well for the first three miles. Shortly after that, I started to feel a bit of tenderness.  I then went to walking backwards for most of my 60 second walks.  That seemed to ease out the tenderness.  Then around mile 7, I felt some pain.  Looking at my Garmin, I found I had sped up to a bit under a 10 minute mile pace, so I slowed way down and increased my walking to 2 minutes each quarter mile.  After a few rotations of this, things settled down, and I was able to finish feeling remarkably well for how I felt on Thursday.  I was very surprised to see my final time of 2:31.  Much better than I thought I would finish under the circumstances.

All in all, a good day.  Not what I set out to do, but still a good day.  I plan on taking a couple of weeks off from running to make sure everything heals fully, then I will start slowly to build up to a full marathon this November.

See you on the road.

Update from March

March is now finished, and it is time to look over my numbers and see how the month went.

I was able to get in 17 runs for a total of 89 miles and got out once on my bike for an hour and a leisurely 14 miles. Running did include attending two events, an 8K and my first half marathon.  In looking back over my last three months, I have been averaging close to 90 miles per month. Going back to October, which was my first month that I concentrated on running 4 times a week as my target goal, I see the following stats for each month.

Month	Miles	Average Pace
October	76.2	12:07
November	100.1	11:35
December	61.3	10:47
January	89.7	10:37
February	97.2	10:26
March	89.0	10:18

I'm real pleased with the gradual improvement in my average pace, that should make a real difference as I start working up to doing a full marathon.  If I can bring it down a bit more, I may be able to look at targeting a time of around 4:30.  I had originally thought I would target a five hour marathon, but if my pace keeps dropping, maybe I can do better than that.

Next week I will do my second half marathon.  Then a couple of easier weeks.  I will probably start putting in some bike time then for cross training.  After that, it will be time to get serious about setting up a training schedule.  Starting the first week of May there will be 28 weeks until the OBX marathon.  Should be enough time.

See you on the road.