This Sunday I’m going to be running the 2013 Chilly Half Marathon, my first race of the season! My marathon training has really ramped up over the past three months so I’m really anxious to get out on the course and see how it goes. I’ve come up with three pretty realistic goals for the race.
Goals for the 2013 Chilly Half Marathon:
Goal 1 – 1:40 (PR) finish
Goal 2 – Sub 1:44 (PR) finish
Goal 3 – Have fun and enjoy beer and chilli after the race
I’ve been using the marathon training plan from Daniels’ Running Formula-2nd Edition and I’ve been able to follow it very closely. Jack Daniels is one of the world’s best running coaches and this book is an invaluable training resource for all runners. If you’re serious about running, I highly recommend you get yourself a copy. If you just want to look up your own training paces/finish times, you can use the official Jack Daniels Running Calculator.
All of my training paces are based off a VDOT score of 45. This means to nail a 1:40 half marathon, my race pace is 4:44/km. To break my current PR of 1:44, my race pace is 4:56/km (my full marathon pace). I’ve already done some marathon pace running during my LSD runs, so I don’t see a big problem in at least achieving goal #2. The 3rd goal will be achieved regardless of finish time, but if there’s ice and snow on the road I’m not going to risk going out too fast and taking a bad spill. This will also be my first race in Vibram FiveFingers, which I’ve worm on all of my training runs (and I’ve totally nailed them all.)
After a brief warm up, I plan on running a pretty even race as I haven’t practiced using a negative split. I will consume 2 dried figs every 30min and take a few sips of coconut water when needed so I won’t need to stop at any water stations.
There will be no repeats of last year’s race. I pulled my calf and IT band about 2km into the race and still finished in 2:20. It was pretty stupid of me to continue on like that so I won’t be doing it again. I have an extra year of training and barefoot running under my belt so I’m pretty confident going in to this one. Stay tuned for the race report.