Half marathon 2.0 training

I haven't posted about running in forever, but I've totally kept up with it (at least over the past two months), amazingly.

After the Seattle Rock N' Roll half marathon at the end of June, I pretty much stopped running for two months. It was a nice break, but not recommended. It's not like I was planning to stop, it's just that my rest week turned into a rest month, and whenever you stop running for more than two weeks, you are pretty much screwing yourself. Valuable lesson: don't totally stop running if you ever plan to do it again! Just run a few miles two times a week, that's all it takes! The idea is just to keep yourself reasonably fit and maintain your running endurance.

So, after a painful few weeks of getting the ol' gears turning again, the long runs commenced with five miles on Oct. 3rd. We just did seven this past weekend, and freakishly all three long runs so far have gone pretty well! I remember in the spring every long run felt never-ending and occasionally tortuous. Maybe I retained some of my endurance? One can only hope.

During the week I'm doing 2-3 short runs, at a minimum of three miles in length, at my goal race pace. I'm working my way up to four mile short runs, and right now I'm around 3.4. Ultimately, I'd like every short run for the three final weeks to be four miles in length.

For this upcoming race, I'm using this training time to tweak some things I missed last time. The biggest is my water consumption: I just don't really like drinking it when I'm running, and that's why I got dehydrated at the end of the race in June. Now, I'm trying to make my long runs simulate the race better, and forcing myself to drink more. That means I need a bigger water belt, because currently I can only carry 8oz. Oh, damn, have to go shopping.

I'm also going to experiment replace Clif Shot Blocks with Nerds, because it seems like those will pretty much achieve the same thing and I'll be much more enthusiastic about consuming them. I'll keep you updated.