Sarahritchie17 This morning, I got up before the sun and headed out for my first half marathon. It was the 2nd Annual New Orleans Women’s Day Half Marathon.
If you’ve been following along with my journey, you know I’ve been training for this race for about 2 months. At the beginning of this year. I shared the 15K training plan I used just over a year ago in training for the Gasparilla 15K, and now I want to share my half marathon training plan and how that went.
The race itself went really well! It was a lot of fun, and I surprised myself with the pace I was able to maintain. The course was well-marked, and water/Gatorade stations were placed every two miles. The worst part was a hill bridge, and the course was a double loop so you had to run the bridge four times. It slowed me down a little, but I was determined not to walk.
Side note: Since the run was in honor of International Women’s Day, I listened to only Taylor Swift and Beyoncé music during the run, and I (mentally) dedicated my run to women in history and women who are making history today. I had a great conversation later today with my boyfriend about women who have inspired us in our lives. Some of the names that came up were Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Sally Ride, J.K. Rowling, and Oprah—just to name a few.
Regardless of inspiration and motivation though, if you want to make something happen, you have to have a plan. In December, I wrote out my training plan for this half marathon, and here’s how that went…
I know what it looks like at first glance. Yes, I only actually stuck to 27 out of 63 days. Yes, I changed a lot of workouts around based on my dynamic work and travel schedule as well as weather. Yes, I had 10 “cheat days.” Yet, I still managed to finish about 10 minutes faster than I predicted. So here are five lessons I learned about myself from my training plan and finishing my first half.
1. I don’t workout on travel days.
I’m sure this isn’t just me, but I am not good at working out when I have a day of sitting in airports and on planes. I wish I was better about this, but I just didn’t find the energy on each of my travel days this month. I think next time, I’ll give myself some grace on those days and plan to stretch or do a 10 minute ab workout instead of trying to commit to something unrealistic for me.
2. It’s okay to deviate.
Switching around some of (a lot of) the days to better fit my schedule and the weird weather around this time of year, encouraged me to actually do the workouts, made them more enjoyable, and didn’t seem to make a difference during the race. I still think having the plan prepared me better than if I’d had no plan. I definitely recommend adjusting things as necessary each week to make sure you’re enjoying the training, it’s working for your individual body, and not beating yourself up when you’re not sticking to the plan exactly as written.
3. Half the number of long runs.
For me, the long runs every Sunday were rough. It was hard to find the motivation to get up on Sunday mornings and run for the distance I committed myself to. I ended up doing about half of them. I was worried I hadn’t done enough distance training leading up to the race, but I really don’t think doing 12 miles last weekend would have helped me today. That’s me personally though. Everyone is different. Next time, I’ll plan on doing long runs 4 or 5 of the weeks instead of all 9.
4. Miles 9-12 were rough.
I realize I literally just said that I cut some long runs, and it wasn’t a big deal. Now I’m saying the end of the race was tough. Logically, it would make sense that if I trained more long-distance, those miles would have been easier. Here’s the thing though. Every long run I did in training, I died the second half. I would go from 9:10 pace at the start of my run to 11:00 pace at the end. I went into this half thinking that if I could stay under 10:30 every mile, I’d be happy. When I say miles 9-12 were rough, they were between 9:27 and 9:50 pace. That’s fast for me for a distance run. I think that if I’d done more distance running in my training, it would have made my training un-fun and more of a chore. Because I am happy with my time, it was worth letting some of those long-runs go. The lesson here for me was that these are the miles I need to put some focus into working next time in the few practice long-runs that I do. Also to develop the mental stamina to push myself through these miles.
5. I am stronger than I think.
Going into this race, I set a goal time, and a dream time. I mean, it was my first half, so really I just wanted to finish and run the whole thing. I knew I could finish. I did 11 miles a couple weeks ago in training—another 2.1 would be nothing at that point. I looked at my average paces on runs during training as well as times from last years race to see what people in my age bracket were running. My goal time was under 2:10:00, and my dream time was under 2:00:00 because that seemed like a huge milestone. I really thought this was unrealistic, but in the end, I finished at 2:00:36. And yes, I could be disappointed about those extra 36 seconds, but I’m not. I did way better than I thought I would, and I gave it my best effort. You can’t give any more than that.
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Cheers!
Sarah
