Hello everyone, I have started a blog site to start writing down my thoughts, ideas, and passion of running, to share with everyone. I am also doing this, to help me with some issues that I am trying to work out. So if you read these enjoy and I would love to hear feedback from you all.
Yesterday on the 24th of October I ran my first race in 5 months. When I was overseas, the only option for running was to run on a treadmill. I have only been running on the roads for about a week before this race. On the drive up to Augusta, I kept running into a lot of rolling hills, so I thought to myself this 1/2 was going to be like Atlanta half that I ran last March. Boy was I wrong it was worse.
The first mile, I went out a little slow, but I did not want to go out to fast and die at the end. One of my goals was to have a negative split which I achieved. So after the first mile, I started to pick up the pace a little bit until I hit mile 3. Mile 3 was the start of the biggest hill, I have ever ran. I could not see the top of this hill (or should I say mountain) until I was in the middle of mile 4. That's right, it was a 2 mile long climb. Then you got about 300 meters of flat running until the hill continued. Lets just say miles 3 through 6 were not my best.
So once I reached the top of the hill, I just remember hearing a fan say your at the top now fly down the down hill. My legs were smoked by then. The good thing is, that I have faced downhills like this before (at Boston) so I was fine with running downhill. Anyways I reached the half way point of this race in just under 45 minutes. Now once I saw that I knew i wasn't going to PR today but I still really wanted to break 1:30 minutes. I knew this course was harder than Atlanta, so I wanted to run faster here.
The next half was mostly downhill. I got to mile 10 in 1:07:41 not that fast but I knew if I could push myself for the last 5K I would break 1:30. The last 5K was awful. It was mostly on the express way which meant a lot of rolling hills and sharp turns, which slowed me down. When I got to the last 200 meters, I did my best to kick but I was only able to do the last 200 meters in 37 seconds. i finished with a time of 1:28:45, not bad for this course.
My coach did the calculations and if I would have ran on a flat course I would have been around 1:25. Not bad, and that puts me on pace to break 3 hours in NYC in two weeks. So that was that. I will try to post a blog after a lot of workouts and all my races to keep you all posted.
As many of you know I am running for the Lead the Way Fund, which helps families of fallen Rangers. I will support this charity until I can not run anymore. Please take a look at it and donate if you choose to.
Thank you all very much, and happy running
Jon
