Random Banter

 The last race I did was a half marathon at the end of March and for my speed it was more of a shuffle than anything. This was my first race since then and with my coach.   The couple of weeks prior to this race we had backed off of the long runs and did some specific running focused on the 5K speed.  I had dreams of setting a new 5K PR at this elevation (I set a 5K PR at a much lower elevation that I hope to break some day!).  In order to set a 5K PR I needed to average a mile pace of something like 8:15 or less.  I was optimistic to start with but after a workout or two of trying to hold that pace I knew it wasn't in the books.  So I re-adjusted and just wanted to beat my time from the previous year (27:10).   It was kind of odd because the race was on Thursday rather than a Saturday when most races are held. But it is what it is.  The weather turned out to be pretty good because we had been having some high temperature's leading into it.  It ended up being in the high 50'

 As is usual I'm really only writing this for myself but I do enjoy writing, it provides and outlet, so I'm gonna put down a few thoughts.  My half marathon on March 24th went better than expected, finish time of 2:26:50, which is better than the previous one I had done.  Despite doing the majority of that training on the treadmill I'm pretty happy with that.  I do plan on getting another one one the list, for the fall, and will hopefully getting close to 2 hours.  I'd love to go sub 2 but we will see.  Along those lines I have hired a coach to see if they can help me go to the next level.  For the past few years, in my mind, I have been stuck at this level.  Just never able to take the next step to more volume and getting faster.  This coaches philosophy is a lot of very low intensity training with one really hard day thrown in.  So I'm running slower than I was previously most of the time but there is one really hard day...or we will get there (I'm guessing th

 It's been awhile but I wanted to get this out more for myself than anything.  This Sunday the 24th is my half marathon.  Starting off the year with this race.  I'm not considering it an A race by any stretch of the imagination.  It was more of a race that I was using to keep active through the winter.   On reflection I'm not sure it was the best idea.  My time might have been better spent doing some training and maybe pushing things a little more.  However I did run the longest I've run in a couple of years which I think is needed.  Having said that I didn't do anything that got me close to a half marathon distance. So Sunday will be interesting to see how it goes.   My goal is to try and run somewhere around 12:30 to 12 minute miles.  The one thing I have going for me is that this race is at a slightly lower elevation but not much. I'm fairly confident in this because on my last long run outside I was just just running fairly slowly and it was at a 11:55 pace.

 Today was the long run.  I wasn't sure what to expect on this but I was going to concentrate on keeping my heart rate low. And overall I think I did a pretty good job.  My intention was to run for 65 minutes but as I hit 65 minutes I was still feeling good and was still a bit away from home. So I ran for a few more minutes and went slightly over 70 minutes.  Which I'm really happy with.  At 55 minutes I picked it up a bit.  While I'm trying this slow running I think having some speed in there is important.  Lets call it a fast finish.  So I ran 10 minutes at a faster pace and then had 5 minutes cool down. Overall a great feeling and I'm excited to run again.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do this next week. Maybe some strides on Wednesday but we will see.  I have some vacation time so I might be able to do a bit more! Here's a screenshot of my long run. As you can see not super long and not a lot of power but I'm not worrying about that.  But the heart

 It's been a few days...a little over a month! I'd like to say that I've been doing something great but that's not the case. Here's what I think I've done in that time period.  I did the 5 days a week of running and found after a few weeks I just didn't have the desire to run anymore. So I cut it back to 4 days a week, which is what I've mostly been doing, and it's been good but I also feel like I haven't been running enough...LOL!   Last week I attempted to start up a Stryd half marathon training plan but also stopped that.  I did the first two days came down with something, not to bad thankfully, and just had no desire to continue it. Based on these two things I think it shouldn't surprise you that I find it really hard to run or find motivation this time of year.  So for now I'm just running.  More focusing on building that base...the aerobic base that is.  I still have plans to do the half marathon in late March, haven't signed up

Today was the day I had been thinking about for the past 5 weeks or so.  It was race day! My last race, to recap, was the trail race at the end of August.  It went well but I came out of that race kind of down due to expectations being set to high and it messed with my head a bit.  I did get over and it's helped me reframe how I think about racing. Racing shouldn't be worrying about what place you will get or even what time you should get (mainly for trails I've discovered) but should be about you versus the course. So that's how I went into this race.   As I mentioned in my post last week my critical power did go down but I thought that was a mistake.  However I thought about it all week and thought maybe it was correct.  On Monday I did a work out of 6 times 2 minutes with 1 minute recovery which was about half of what I had done the previous Monday and I have to say it felt relatively easy.  So heading into the race I told myself that I was going to and stay between