Running Diary Part Deux – Weeks 1 & 2
Back in January, Wife and I ran the Carlsbad Half Marathon, my first half marathon. Those 13.1 miles were the first in a series of three half marathons, making up the Triple Crown. We are now training for the La Jolla Half Marathon on April 26th, 2009. This is week 1 and 2 of that half marathon training program.
After a nice long break the time came to restart our running regime. We are using almost the exact same program that we created for the Carlsbad Half Marathon. However, from the start we will only be running 3 times a week as opposed to 4. We will also try to run faster. When we trained last time we averaged an 11 minute mile and ran a 10 minute mile during the half marathon. This time our goal is to shave off a minute from our miles during training and hopefully run a 9 minute mile during the next race. So now I will also include our times to help us stay on track!
Wednesday - 2 miles - 20:02
A nice short run and a great way to restart the training. We knew we could go farther but we wanted to take it easy on ourselves in order to prevent old injuries from coming back. We felt good and made record time.
Friday - 3 miles - 28:00
We followed our normal route around East Mountain View. We like it because it is a big loop and we end a block or two away from the condo, depending on how well the GPS tracks us. As you can see from our time we booked it (at least by our standards). A conversation was hard to have but we ran fast and felt good at the end.
Sunday - 3 miles - 27:48
Our same route and even faster then on Friday. The conversation died at about mile 2 but we kept on our good pace!
Tuesday - 3 miles - 28:16
Not as fast as Sunday but still a respectable time. We just ran around the ol' loop just to keep things simple on this early morning run.
Thursday - 4 miles - 39:19
We have been told their are two killer hills (one is really bad) during the La Jolla Half Marathon. So we have changed our route to include more hills. They may not be big, but at least they have an incline. So we obviously slowed our mile time a bit but hey, we made it down and up the hills in under 40 minutes!
Saturday - 5 miles - 47:35
At this point we don't even bother talking to each other (we still do but it is labored) because of how fast we are trying to go and the newly added hills. We ran almost the same route as the 4 mile run but added on another block and ran back to the big hill doing it twice. It felt great because we averaged around 55 minutes during our last training program and now we are down under 50 minutes.
We still have a long way to go until the April run but we are feeling better about it. Once you have done it, the second time is easier. We just need to incorporate more hills so that we do not die in the hot April sun. With two weeks behind us we look forward to our third and also something we have not done in a very long time!
