Half Marathon

I am officially signed up for a half marathon Sunday Sept 4th and I am pumped! :)  (I know, I know...who gets excited about running 21K/13.1miles??)  I love the feeling when I cross that finish line....I'm pretty sure I had tears in my eyes last year when I crossed the Columbus half finish line.  You train for weeks and weeks, you have good runs and not-so-good runs, and the day finally comes.  You are excited, nervous, maybe even thinking 'what the h*ll did I get myself into??'  But you signed up, you trained, and now you're there at the start line.  You just have to go for it and do your best!  The adrenaline rush you feel and the excitement of the crowd gets you pumped up before the race starts and it is an amazing feeling.  Then when you cross the finish line, the sense of accomplishment is incredible.  Once I finish a half marathon, my legs are in quite a bit of pain and I usually think, 'I'm never doing that again'.  Then I take the winter off running, I get amnesia as to how much pain I felt after the race, then spring comes and I'm ready to run again.  By summertime, I'm ready to have something to work towards, and I end up signing up for another half.  So here I am again 9 months after my last half, and signed up and ready to go in September!

When I train, I am not hardcore and don't stick to a definite training plan.  For several reasons, a) I never stick exactly to the schedule, things come up and you have to change running days, etc b) I am not doing it for time c) You can't predict when you are going to have good running days and bad running days so I would rather just go with the flow, and finally d) It takes all the fun out of running if I know I have to do exactly this on this day and so on.  My basic goal this training season is to run 3-5 miles 2-3 times a week, then a long run on the weekends, adding more mileage each weekend as I get closer to the race.  A patient told me about this place called the MacRitchie reservoir that has a loop that is 12k around that I plan to check out this weekend when I go for a long run.  I know the MacRitchie reservoir has monkeys too! :) :)     

Have a nice weekend readers! :)