All I ask myself is that I hold together

I had another title, but want to hold that one until after the race. This was going to be all about my long run on Sunday. But I think I will sum up the week leading up to my half marathon Sunday. I had every intention of getting up early last Sunday to mimic what my morning would be like on race day. Plan: Have iced coffee ready first thing in the morning. Eat breakfast. Poop. Leave house by 8:30am. Be back to house by 10:45am. Here is what really happened. Alarm went off at 6:30am. The bed was warm was stayed there until 7:30am. Decided it was okay if I got on the road by 9am. I got up and ate breakfast. I could feel that I had bathroom business to take care of. This is my biggest Achilles heel – my digestive track. I spend the next hour trying to get something going. But now I’m at the point of no return. I take medicine – which I know is not great – to sort of keep things at bay until my 13 miles are up. This puts me in a mood. I decided to make the best of it and grab my GPS. What the? It’s frozen. It’s the second time it has done this. First time was at the triathlon. I was about to cry. This was not how I wanted to start my trial run. After researching the web on how to fix my watch, I was finally on my way.

I won’t get into a mile by mile account. I started strong. Averaged a 10:20 something mile. It wasn’t until mile 9 that I felt myself slow down a bit. I had a major hill at mile 10.5 which I ended up walking up part way. As I suspected, I was feeling pretty rough after that hill and needed a bathroom ASAP. I decided to ditch the second loop around and headed home. I thought I had done 11.99 miles. After I was done uploading my data, it ended up being only 11.59. Bummer. I did manage to average a 10:41 pace. Not too bad for 11 miles. Technically, I’d only have a mile and a half to go. My time was 2:04 – so….I might have made it in 2:20 minutes. That would be 19 minutes better than my first half marathon. I am aiming for a finish of 2:20. I went to a training clinic that went over how one should tackle this course. If I can run a comfortable 10 min mile until the hills – that would be great.

Training the rest of the week was a massive bust. I took Monday off since I was a little sore. Tuesday through Thursday either featured rain or no sleep. Today was the first time I was able to go out there. I can’t tell you exactly how fast I was since the GPS decided to take the first a nap the first .60 mile. It took me 30:22 to run about 3.1 miles. Tomorrow, I’ll run an easy 2 miles – then rest.