Personal Records

10 hours of sleeping, that's a personal record! I haven't slept in for quite awhile since the last few weekends I've been getting up early for morning runs. But with the mornings now being 30 degrees, that's not happening. Odd thing is, Megan has been giving up her naps lately and she is STILL sleeping in.

The rest of this blog is going to be somewhat of a brag fest, so if you're not on board, might as well just stop reading now. This year of running has been good for me. If you had asked me at the start of the year if I could do some of the distances and paces I've accomplished this year, I would have laughed, but sure enough... I hit a lot personal records this year, including 5 "offical" race personal records and a personal distance record. Here are my records for the year:

Distance	Time	Pace	Date
1 m	5:51	5:51	New distance
6.2 m (10k)	45:32	7:21	April 26th
6.2 m (10k)	45:11	7:17	July 26th
13.1 m (half)	1:38:15	7:30	June 7th
15.5 m (25k)	2:08:06	8:16	New distance

The reason I mention these is because I have one last race coming up in a week, next Saturday. It's a half marathon and I'm thinking about trying to squeeze one more PR out of this year. I'm setting a goal of 96 minutes, which translates to a 7:20 pace. So basically, I'm going to attempt to run the half marathon at roughly a 10k pace.

That's rough... and there is big potential that I could hurt myself trying this but I want to give it a shot. I've been speed training a lot this last 2 months, which is in part why I got the recent injury. (I was coming off a speed run the previous day). Thursday of this week I did another speed test to see how my leg would hold out, and although there was no pain, around mile 5 I could feel the initial tightness so I slowed it down a bit. Ran last night with no lasting effects, so hopefully it will be ready for race day.

The thing I'm wondering is if perhaps this year has seen the peak of my running and it's all going to be down hill from here (pun intended).

Here are the details from Thursdays run. As you can see, I only hit my "goal" pace of 7:20 two times during the run. First at mile 5 where I felt GREAT at first, then slowed down, then again at the end of the run. The red line indicates the pace I'm going to try for... for 13.1 miles.