January’s half over now. I haven’t lost a pound. But I’ve exercised a lot and am happy with my fitness levels. I ran a hard 4.5 miles the other day and felt sore in my hamstrings when I finished. My resident running expert said that if your hamstrings are sore you’ve been pushing your pace and if your quads are sore, you’ve been pushing your distance. I know that if I want to finish my 1/2 marathon in 2 hours, I have to get some speed work done, so I guess sore hamstrings are a good thing.
Now that my running goal is out there in two places (here and here), I decided that I really need to make a plan to accomplish that goal. So I went over to Runner’s World and accessed their Smart Coach website. It’s a cool little interface where you type in a previous race time, how many miles you’re currently running, how hard you want to train, what distance you’re training for and how long you have to train for it. Then it spits out a week by week plan tailored to get you to your goal. The one thing that it doesn’t do is let you type in a goal time for the race you’re training for. So I’m not sure how fast this thing thinks I’m going to run my race. But all of the workout paces look like they’re about right. If you need a race training plan, you might want to check it out. If you’re interested here’s the training plan that I was given. I might modify it a bit, but it’s the general plan that I’m going to follow to get enough miles in so that my body is ready for the half marathon in May
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
The half is a great distance. I’m sure you’ll have a blast doing it.
Congrats on taking the plunge and picking the race. I was in your shoes this time last year so I can’t help but add my $.02.
Two things:
1.) For your first race, I’d recommend putting the time goal out of your mind. I know it’s hard to do, but you should really just focus on finishing and having a good race. I’ve found that it’s difficult to predict a finishing time anyway because the race conditions can significantly impact your time (for better or worse). The terrain, your adrenaline, and the weather can easily move your splits +/- 20 seconds on race day. Save the time goal for the next year or race.
2.) Your training plan seems really tough. The last thing you want to do is over train, injure yourself, and not be able to run. I found that my body really started to break down as a I toggled from ~15 miles a week to 25 plus. For my first race I followed Hal Hidgon’s novice plan and I was plenty prepared to run a sub 2 hr half.
I really have no idea how fast I can run this distance. And my wife thought that this would be a pretty tough training schedule as well. That’s why I wrote that bit about modifying the training guide–to leave myself some wiggle room. I’ll take a look at Hal Hidgon’s novice plan to see what it’s like. Thanks for the input.
Who cares if you haven’t lost a pound? That doesn’t mean you haven’t improved aerobically.
Strong effort with the running and good luck to you with the half marathon. It’s a substantial distance and real challenge to get sub 2 hrs.
“…if your hamstrings are sore you’ve been pushing your pace and if your quads are sore, you’ve been pushing your distance.” – I like that a lot.
Regards,
Dan.
Congrats on picking a race. I agree that the half is a good distance, but unless you’ve done a great deal of running, I agree that I would make the time a secondary goal. When I did mine, I wanted to hit the 2 hour mark, but my primary goal was just to finish. I knew that the 2 hour goal would be a stretch goal, and the day of the race, it was about 10-degrees hotter than normal. Killed my time. Anyway, congragulations!
Good luck with your training!!. I plan to start next Tuesday a program to run a 5K in 16 weeks (if no injuries). So let’s see how will it go!.
Hopefully I will do better than with the 100 push-ups program (which I must say did not finished
)…
Awesome! I just registered for my first half-marathon in December. I will be running it in mid-February. Less than a month to go. Yikes! I better get back to running.
Good luck with your race. I am also loosely following the Hal Higdon half marathon training program, though I am trying for the intermediate one. I agree with the previous comments not to focus on the time! My goal is to finish, even though I have been keeping track of my times as I run. Keep going. You can do it.