Spring Training

Following the winter high of have a great time doing cyclocross, finishing 3rd in my age group for the overall points series in the River Towns Race Series, and having a blast (as always) during the Humdinger, I felt it prudent to sign up for the River Towns Half Marathon (I did resist the full marathon, for now).  While fully under the influence of that continued rush, I was also contemplating doing the 45 Miles of Mon-Tour, which is just 2 weeks after the marathon.

I used the rest of my winnings from last year's series to register for the half and started thinking about how soon it actually is and how long my current long run has been (past tense, I ran about 5 times in March) and realized that I couldn't go much farther than 5 or 6 miles after school and be able to pick up the boy from daycare.  "That's ok," I thought.  "I can do long runs on the weekend."  Then I started thinking how much time it took to train with 20 mile bike rides and how much longer it would take to get me, and my rear, in shape for riding 45 miles.  Combined with the hectic nature of spring and school and my time constraints, I decided not to do the 45 Miles of Mon-Tour.  However, now that I'm writing about it and seeing that I would have 2 whole weeks after the half...

The training for the half is going great, though.  I was thinking that I would like to finish in under 2 hours, which equates to about 9-minute miles.  While I've gotten my 5k pace down to 8-minute miles, I'm just about redlining to finish and that's only 3 miles.  So, last week I head out to do 5 miles and I average 9:27.  I felt like I was pushing, but not too hard.  A few days later I do 8 miles and average 9:50.  This week I go for a hard 4 and average 8:48 miles and today, I did 10 with a pace of 9:24 min/mile.  The best part about today's run was that I wasn't killing myself to keep the pace.  I think my goal is within reach and I have 5 weeks to get my mileage and speed up.

Maybe I should do the 45...