ChiTown Half Marathon

A lot going on since the last post.  I will get to a couple topics over the course of the next few days.  I’m heading down to a friend’s wedding in South Carolina on Wednesday and hope to do some updating while I’m away for the next few weeks.  

First, the race report from the ChiTown Half Marathon.  My last post was the day before that race.  I went into the race with one primary goal: to not get injured.  My secondary goal was to run a decent pace of what I thought to be 1:18:00 or better.  I didn’t approach this as a true race.  I tapered for about 2-3 days and didn’t alter my normal life/work schedule much at all.  I actually took home call the night before which meant fielding calls from patients in the middle of the night.  I intentionally didn’t take this night off as I wanted it to be a reminder that I wasn’t trying to go all out during the race.  Quite simply, I wasn’t in good enough shape to do that and not hurt myself.  I don’t have a good enough base yet to do that.  Unfortunately, one of these reminder calls came less than 20 minutes to gun time and about 4 minutes before my home call shift was finished.  So that meant I had to pause my brief warm-up to hear an update about a patient from a nursing home.  Not a big interruption but something to take the focus off the race none-the-less.  

The morning was a beautiful 45 degrees without much of a wind; couldn’t ask for better conditions.  The gun went off and the pace was quicker than I expected.  I was thinking I’d run about 6:15 per mile and the leaders would probably start at 6:00 per mile.  Since I hadn’t been running much, my internal pacing was entirely off and I was going to cue off of them.  Unfortunately, my estimate of their pace was quiet off as they ran through mile one at 5:30 and me at 5:45.  I did quickly settle into a rhythm and clipped off most of the miles at 5:50 to 5:55 pace.  I was pleased with maintaining this tempo and wanted to maintain until the last two miles before I challenged myself.  I mostly ran with another runner until he stalled with about 2 miles to go and I went around him and didn’t slow down.  I finished 7^th overall out of almost 1600 people in 1:17:09.  Felt pretty good to get some of the cobwebs out but unfortunately I paid for my pacing indiscretions the next week as I had to cut back on my workouts.  In hindsight, I wasn’t ready to compete and I didn’t hold back as much as I hoped I could.  

After that week off, however, I was able to ease back into my mileage and get some good pacing in.  Most of the training thus far has been long, slow distance primarily focusing on building a wide aerobic base.  I’m putting some miles in but it is by no means intense.  

The next post will likely be in a few days.  I do have a few topics to cover including thoughts on training partners, questions about motivation, recharging your batteries, and personal thoughts on depression and tragedy.  If you have specific questions you’d like me to address, please let me know by leaving comments or sending me an email.  Emily, I will get to your request to write out my food diary including total calories consumed per day.  I’m still not at my big training yet so I’ll hold out until that happens.

Thanks for reading!