Follow Me to the Women's Running Half Marathon

The Women's Running Half Marathon and 5/10k is a specatular event. The race takes place in late November in St. Petersburg, Florida, which might be one of the best times to be outside in Florida. It's unofficially an only women race and the sensations of pride, empowerment, and sorority float on the cold bay breeze. I ran last year as a 5k participant and had a ball. This year I will be running the full 13.1 miles around my old stomping grounds. Why did I choose this race to mark my first competitive attempt at distance running? Why try to run a half marathon at all?

Why the swag of course!

It's a pendant, it's a medal, it's a pedal! ...no wait that's not right.

Honestly I want to start traveling more for races. That is my goal with this blog. I want to travel the country, maybe even the world, to experience races all over in all their pomp and ceremony. I want to meet other runners and to encourage others to get out and be active. I want an excuse to make weekend get-a-ways to cities I've always wanted to see. I want to write about these races as the madness on foot that they are in a way that could only be accomplished by gonzo journalism. I certainly can't capture all of that in a 5k run. To drive an hour and a half across town to get on a plane to fly four or five hours on a red eye, check into a hotel in the host city, get up at five in the morning to get to the race site, spend the next hour dwaldling and stretching and muscling for position, then the two hour after party, an unforeseeable amount of time goofing off and exploring the city only to fly back to be back to reality on Monday, all that for only 30 minutes of running? It seems hardly justified. So I've decided to start working on longer distances and running them faster. I'm starting to get close to the top of my age group in most of the 5k's that I run and it suddenly pace and starting position seem like the matter.

I've tried out a couple of web based training programs and I am sticking with Polar. I like doing the heart rate based training because when I feel I'm finished and I need to slow down I can look down at that friendly little monitor and it tells me, "Keep it moving, this is only 75%," and when my power song pops up and I want to run all out during a rest interval it reminds me to hold back. I have noticed my pace has improved since I started wearing a heart rate monitor and I have been able to go further much quicker than with programs I've tried in the past. This week starts off where I left off with my 10k training, with a goal of three runs totaling at just under 20km for the week. Next week I have 4 runs at 28km and gradually building from there. The program includes rest weeks with lighter loads and heart rate targets with warm up and peak periods for each run. I'm very excited to see where this goal will take me and what the journey will be like. Stay tuned! Better yet, try to keep up!