Four days!!

My youngest son and I have stayed home today because he has a nasty cold, and I wanted us to have a day to just hang out and relax. I've gotten stuff done around the house all morning, so while he's napping I decided to do some Googling on my upcoming race. I've been pretty anxious about it, but just in the last day or two I've started to get excited. Like really excited. In my searching, I came across a video of the race from two years ago. In watching it, I cannot wait to cross that finish line!!

Running 13.1 miles is something I never, ever thought I would do. And I would have never, ever thought I'd be excited to do it. I've hated running my whole life, and now I love it. I'm so amazed at how far I've come since starting to run at the beginning of this year. I was reading back through old blog posts and laughed to myself when I said something about struggling to run five minutes in a row.

I'm so freakin' excited!

Here's the video in case you're interested:

Total Miles

I just walked past my training schedule on the side of my fridge and was curious how many miles I've ran while training for my half marathon. I don't have an exact number because I didn't always use a tracking app when I ran on the treadmill. I've since started using the Nike Plus app for treadmill runs. I used it for a three mile run outside to see how it compared, and I found it to be inaccurate in my distance. Three miles is a distance I do often enough that I know the exact points where I hit 1.5 miles and turn around and when I hit three miles once I'm back in my neighborhood. This was off by 0.10, which I think is pretty significant. Normally I use the Run Keeper app for my outdoor runs. I really like it, and it syncs to a website so you can see all sorts of great information about your run once you're done.

So my rough estimate of miles ran in preparing for my upcoming half marathon:

194.5

Yowza!!! That's a lot of mileage! Granted it's probably a little higher because there were some 30 minute runs here and there that I didn't do, but I'd say it's off by no more than 8 miles total. Wow!! That's amazing!! And really by the end of this week it will actually be right around 200 since I'll do 2.5 tomorrow, and I think we're doing three miles this weekend.

Wow!!!

Running update

Apparently I've used this as a blog entry title before. Oh well. The half marathon is 12 days away, so I thought an update was in order. I'm pretty freaked out about it, to be perfectly honest. After our 11 mile run we decided it was too hot here to do another long run before the race, but we really needed to do another long run. We had the genius idea of driving 90 minutes north where it's usually significantly cooler to do a 12 mile run. We knew the altitude might be an issue, but honestly I thought the cooler temperature would counteract the thinner air. As in, yes it would be slightly harder to breathe, but it's significantly cooler so it won't be that bad. Ha! Was that ever a dumb idea. We only did 4.8 miles before we called it quits. The altitude kicked our asses. Our average pace was around 13:00. Yikes. Even my hilly run in San Francisco was faster than that, so I know it had to be the altitude, not the hills we were running on. It was also a lot warmer than we anticipated.

It was a pretty huge confidence killer actually. I said to my husband the night before that I was ready to take the 12 mile run and make it my bitch. Then for it to just be a complete fail was really hard and killed any sense of morale I had for the race. Even in runs following that it's been hard, I keep thinking that since I had a hard time with that one that the race itself is going to be hard too. I know deep down that won't be the case at least. Anaheim is flat, and the temperature will be significantly cooler than it is here, and I'm sure just the temperature difference alone will really help. I know I can run 11 miles, and a half marathon is just two miles further--that's not even 25 minutes at my normal pace.

I did 30 minutes on the treadmill at the gym today and felt great. I ran at 11:30 for most of it and bumped my pace up to 11:19 for the last five minutes. I even enjoyed it, which is rare for me on the treadmill. That helped my confidence a lot--if I can feel like that for the actual race, I should be in good shape. I'm not looking to set any sort of time goal, I really just want to finish and not be disappointed in my time. As long as I finish under 12:30 I'll be pleased.