For Part 1, click here.
When I first signed up to run a half marathon, my goal was to run the whole distance and finish in less than 4 hours (the race limit.) I was running now, but very slowly. My average pace was in the 13-14 minutes per mile range. At that pace, I should have been able to complete the distance in 3 hours easily, but I didn’t know yet if I could maintain that pace for that long. It was a very conservative goal, but I thought it was achievable.
Each week, as I increased my Saturday runs from 3 miles to 4, then 5, then 6, I found that it was always difficult to add a mile, but the level of difficulty didn’t really change. Running 6 miles the first time was just about the same as running 5 miles the first time. Amazingly, to me, my pace didn’t slow down. It got faster. I saw this as assurance that my plan was working, and it really boosted my confidence. I registered for the race with a 3 hour finish time estimate. Throughout the 14 weeks, I continued to increase my Saturday long runs until I was running 11 miles. Most of the training plan examples I saw in my research stopped a little short of the actual race distance. The logic behind this is to prevent overtraining and injury before your race, while still training the body to running longer distances. Many runners do train at the full race distance. My personal preference is to stop short of the race distance, and that has worked for me.
For the first few weeks of training, I based my Tuesday and Thursday runs on time. Then I switched it to distance, doing 3 miles on Tuesday and 4 miles on Thursday. I considered it a major milestone when I first realized that a 3 mile run was now a “short run.”
On the day before my race, I went to the race Expo to pick up my race packet. I had personalized my bib with the words “Slow Traffic” on it, thinking it would be funny for the countless runners who would be passing me. It hadn’t occurred to me that the bib went on the front and no one would see it! However, I had become fast enough to decide at the last minute that I could do the race in 2 hours and 30 minutes, an 11:26 pace. I changed my time and moved up a few corrals. I was ready to run my first race!