It's not that I was trying to hide it, I just kind of never got around to mentioning that I have a half marathon coming up. I started just generally training in July, figuring I could wait until September or October to actually pick a race, and it didn't make sense to talk about race planning here until, you know, I had a race planned!
I had been thinking about something in mid-October; that's when the Other Half Marathon in Moab used to run, which is where I got my PR (amazingly, considering the hills!) but then in late September two of the couples we did the Italy bike trip with invited us to go camping and mountain biking in early October in Prescott, Arizona along with some other friends of theirs, and that was too enticing to turn down. (And it was fun!) But it also meant I needed to have time to ramp up again to get race-ready, so I started looking at November races instead.
It was around this time that I got invited to use Bard, the new Google LLM chatbot (which I think has not yet been fully released), so I asked it about fall and winter races, "with cool or cold weather, in the western US, with a rolling course." Immediately it gave me five races in Colorado, which - I wanted to race somewhere I could use my altitude advantage, so I amended my request with "not in Colorado", and it listed five more races. They looked great...until I actually followed the links, and discovered that one was non-existent (Bard had somehow invented a half marathon from a news article about a high school cross-country meet a few years ago), three were in the spring, and the one that actually was in the fall had the wrong date. So much for "AI!"
So I did a bunch of web searching, and asked on a running sub on Reddit, and got a few
real suggestions. I settled on the Berkeley half, partly because my brother lives in Santa Clara and it would be an excuse to visit him and his family (who I last saw in person about a year and a half ago). He's been doing a crossword & cryptic crossword puzzling get-together with friends on Saturday morning for years, and during the pandemic, when they couldn't meet at a cafe, they switched to on-line meeting. One day he invited me to join them, and now it's been a regular thing for me on Saturday morning for over two years! So I'm looking forward to an in-person puzzling that Saturday morning, too.
And then on Sunday morning, the race! Basically at sea level, with that sweet, sweet oxygen; a couple of moderate hills in the first half, some flat miles in the middle, and then a slow climb to the finish which I will hopefully not notice because sea level.
My training has been - okay. As you may or may not recall, depending on how closely you follow this blog :-) my last two half marathons were the new version of the Canyonlands Half in Moab in March 2022, and the Thirsty Thirteen in Durango in August 2022. For Canyonlands, my training was super solid, with 42.5mpw over the previous 8 weeks and 8 long runs, with fairly fast tempo runs, and I
blew away my own expectations, coming in just under 1:44. For the Thirsty Thirteen, I trained slightly differently, running fewer weekly miles but more speed and tempo workouts and cross-training, and - spoiler alert -
it did not go so well and I just made my B goal, running about 1:47:30.
This cycle, I took the advice of Paul, the world-class 65-year old I met at the Thirsty Thirteen, and put together a 9-day "week" so I could get both tempo and speed in, plus a long run, with two easy runs between. I tried to aim at about 45mpw (that is, per real 7-day week), though because of the mountain biking my average mpw over 12 weeks is closer to 39. (We'll see if I manage to lift this during this last week of training!) I only have 3 12+ mile runs, and although I've been running a lot of tempos and track intervals they have not been nearly as fast as they were 1.5 years ago, alas. And, well - I'm older. At least now I'm at the bottom of my (60-69, how did this happen?!) age group.
So I'm going to be conservative, and say my goal is sub-1:50. It's a stretch based on my tempo runs, but I'm hoping that my altitude bonus will help somewhat; certainly my tempo run when I was in Virginia was surprisingly peppy considering how warm and humid it was. I'm just going to try to ignore how much slower that goal is than my previous ones!
It's still too far out for a real weather forecast, but if the conditions are average for the time of year it should be in the lower 50s to start and upper 50s at the end, which suits me well.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
