1.1 miles to go

Yesterday morning I finished my longest run yet - 12 miles!! I had a hard time deciding what distance to run because I have gotten so much different information about training. I was originally following Hal Higdon's novice half-marathon training plan, but since I started it early I ended up finishing it early. In my revised plan, I had decided to run 11 miles yesterday, 12 miles next week, and then the half the following week. Well...........then I learned about "tapering" before a race and that I really shouldn't run 12 miles the week before the half-marathon. BUT, in Hal Higdon's intermediate training plan there is a 12 mile run the week before the half-marathon. Confused yet? So was I. I understand that the idea of tapering is to give you a rest before your race so that you can run your best, but if I'm not worried about my time, does that really matter? If I was training for a marathon, wouldn't I run 12 miles one week and then 13 the next? What's the difference, really?

In the end, I decided to take bits and pieces of everyone's advice and information and form my own plan. When I started out yesterday I set my nike+ipod for 11.5 miles. That was a good compromise and I knew that if I went that far, I could finish out 12 if I felt like it. I ran the first 8 miles with a great group of ladies (hi!) and then went on to finish the last 4 on my own - well, with my audiobook :-) I really felt good for the entire run and when my ipod congratulated me on finishing 11.5 miles, I already knew that I was going to push for 12. I had to keep checking the distance on my ipod for the last .5 miles because NO WAY was I going further than 12! When you check your status using the ipod, it announces your distance, total time, and pace. By doing this, I realized that I was *very* close to running 12 miles in under 2 hours. I pushed it as hard as I could and finished in 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 30 seconds. Only once I was done did I realize that I had run 12 miles with just under a 10 minute per mile pace. I haven't run under 10 minutes per mile in quite a while! I owe a lot of thanks to the group for that!

I'm feeling good about the half, knowing that I only have to go 1.1 miles further than my longest run. Could I physically do it with 10 miles as my longest run? Probably. Could I mentally do it? Not sure. Knowing what I know now, about how much of a mental sport running is, I'm glad I went the extra distance. Now I have no excuses come race day.

postscript - i have plenty of excuses for why i haven't updated my blog though! none of them are very good, but hey, i'm not getting paid for this :-)