Running update: I finished 2008 having run 600 miles, 3 5ks, 2 10ks, and 1 half-marathon. One of my goals in 2009 is to become a marathoner and I’m already signed up for one in the fall. One of my other goals (which will help me be ready for the marathon goal) is to run at least 100 miles each month.

(No, that doesn’t mean a lot of bathroom runs either, Torrey.)

Anyway, this month started with a bad case of shin splints and that put me back a bit, so now I have 9 days left to run 36.3 miles in order to not start the year already missing one goal.

We’ll see what happens.

First, some background. I never actually started running with long races like this in mind. I just started running because

1. I thought running a 5k seemed like a novel idea, and
2. Breathing heavy 30 seconds into a game of hide and seek with the kids got old.

Anyway, as those of you know who have followed my blog, I found this program called Couch to 5k, and then another one called One Hour Runner, and at some point during a 6 mile run I decided to try to run 10 miles and I did. That’s when I realized that a half marathon was probably within reach and so I started following this program by Hal Higdon (who is apparently a pretty big deal, but I didn’t know that at the time) in hopes of running the Thunder Road Half Marathon on Dec. 13.

In the 8 months I’ve been running, I can honestly say I’ve only had 2 negative experiences. The first was when I bought my Garmin Forerunner 305. The Garmin is great, but that’s when I realized that my Nike+ sportband wasn’t measuring my runs as accurately as I had thought. Seems the Nike+ had been giving me as much as a quarter to a half mile extra distance which made my pace times appear to be quicker than they actually were. Bottom line: in order to run my first half under 2 hours, I was going to run around a 9:10/mile pace which I thought I could do according to my Nike+ runs, but the Garmin was more accurate and told a different story. To sum up in a word: crap! The likelihood of me breaking 2 hours looked a bit slimmer.

The second bad experience was 2 Saturdays before the race when I pulled up with what was either a cramp or a sign of overtraining in my left calf. I was just at the end of a 12.25 mile run and it hurt for a couple of days. I iced it, rested some, really cut down my mileage for 2 weeks before the race and still wasn’t sure what would happen. Now, with all that said, onto the race. Continue reading

After 8 months of running and just under 600 miles logged, I wrap up my first calendar year of running with my first half marathon tomorrow. Looks like I’ll be joining close to 6,000 other people for a nice intimate run in Charlotte at the Thunder Road races.

This being my first and all, I’m not quite sure what to shoot for time-wise. I think I’ll have a couple goals:

• first, my goal is to finish,
• next goal would be to finish in under 2:30:00,
• if I can do that, maybe I can finish in under 2:12:00, and finally
• my “if all the planets align correctly” goal would be to break 2 hours.

It will be interesting to see how the whole thing plays out. I’m looking forward to it and will post when I’m done.