Race day is approaching!

Our Half group, who have remained pretty cohesive during the last number of weeks (that's a good thing) is approaching the race. 32 days from now we will be racing! This is pretty exciting stuff, especially for the members of our group who have not raced at this distance before, and even for those members who have never attempted the time we are attempting. Which leads me to the reason for this post.

We have been training for a 2:14:59 half Marathon. We have been following the book closely and have done a pretty good job to date. Many of you have expressed concerns over the 6:09 running pace that we will have to keep up for the race . In an ideal world, we will all cross the line together, singing songs from Mary Poppins and clacking our heels together in jumps of joy! Well this is race day. It is not unlike training, in that, it is different for everybody and individually it will be different than yesterday, and not the same as the day before that. What we CAN do is prepare well. We can eat well from now until race day, we can stay hydrated and we can take the time for ourselves to focus on ourselves.

When I say focus on ourselves, I mean get prepared to run every time out. I don’t know about you, but the hardest runs I run are the ones I come rushing into the clinic without so much as a minute to spare and unable to think about the task at hand, you know, when you had to work late and just made it in time. They turn out to be pretty tough, for me anyway.

The Idea for a pace group in a clinic is to train for a certain pace in the race, make sense? Each pace group has some goals they want to achieve and I know I have outlined what our mid group has been training for. Some of the goals for the other pace groups may be ‘to complete a half marathon, no matter the time’. Maybe in the fast group the goal is to ‘run a sub 2:00 half’. And the training is geared toward those goals. We ( I mean our pace group) set a goal in the beginning to train for a 2:15 half marathon. Notice I didn’t say our goal is to run a 2:15 half race. I said training for a… well, you get it. What’s my point?

My Point is, you need to be prepared to deal with the thought that this goal may be attainable, or unattainable based on all sorts of things. When I ran my first half, I set 3 goals, 1 was to finish in a sub 2:10, that I would be satisfied with and is VERY achievable. 2 was to finish sub 2:00, that I would be HAPPY with, and 3 was a 1:53 that I would be over the moon at. This way, no matter the outcome (short of not finishing) I could tell myself I reached my goal. If we set a 2:15 race goal and it is –40 with 2 feet of snow, we will be assured of being disappointed. Disappointed is not an option for this race. I want you to set your goals so that no matter the outcome, 1- you finish the race, 2 -you are incredibly proud of yourself, and 3 -you are uninjured and want to still be a runner.

I will be providing a steady pace (in mid to ideal weather conditions) that will cross the line between 2:14:00 and 2:14:59. You are more than welcome to run with me. BUT be prepared to run on your own. You don’t know what will happen on race day. If you have to go to the bathroom, we won’t be stopping (if I have to go, I will catch up to you) to wait. If you get a cramp and have to slow down for a while, you must know that that is OK! you will get through it and you will be able to either pick up the pace to catch up, or finish the race under your own plan! Most of our group is running this race, so there will probably be an opportunity to run with a familiar face in most situations you encounter, but it may also be a lonely race as there are only 200 runners.

Set your goals, prepare to your best ability (DO NOT change anything in the final week, based on what you have done in training. Race morning is VERY tempting to have that free energy bar, DON’T. Please do what you always do!)

Just a note for your goal setting exercise, we (the mid group) run a pace of 7:15ish for our long runs. If you run this same pace for 21.1km you will achieve a finish time of 2:33, do you think you can do that? Is that an achievable goal, to run the race at your LSD pace? Now it’s up to you to figure out what is going to work the best for you.

Please email or comment to me if you have any questions at all about this!