Results!

As everyone knows who reads my posts, I had a half marathon earlier today. I know everyone likes the results first so here they are;

1:40:16; 193rd out of 661 in my age group (35-39) Avg. HR 167; 7:39 avg. mile

This morning I ate a PBJ on a bagel, which I will have to find something else as I tasted it throughout the race. Got to the race with time to spare, saw my friend who runs about the same as me and off we went.

I had told Max that in a perfect world I would like to hold 7:30 miles. I knew this was extremely ambitious as my only ever stand alone half marathon was a 1:59:28.

The first mile was 7:37, the second was even slower. I felt terrible between mile 1.5 and mile 3. By the time I hit mile 5 I was worried if I kept this up I might not break 1:45 (my realistic goal). At mile 7 I figured I better pick up the pace and move it. At mile 10 my watch read 1:19:04, which as I just calculated was 7:54 pace. My PR 5K is 20:27, so I thought there was no chance to sniff 1:40's. I managed somehow a 21:12 5K to get to the finish. Needless to say, I am thrilled with my time and even more so with how I finished.

I have no soreness whatsoever yet, my calves get a little tight sometimes from running (tight ankles). As I am sure we all do with our races, I am thinking I would have loved to break 1:40. When I told this to Max, he said "What's another 17 seconds off of about 20 minutes" Puts it into perspective how far I've come.

Another thing I just checked was my total mileage for the past 3 months, November was 28.2 miles. December was 16.5 miles and January up to today was 14. All of this with never doing more than a 10K.

I guess you really don't have to do a lot of running to improve your running times. I have a very light week coming up and hit the ground running (maybe not so much) in February.