Praying and Running

I ran the Indianapolis Half Marathon Saturday Oct, 8th, 2016 as a tune-up for the 2016 Monumental Marathon. I had the basic 3 goals for my big tune-up half marathon. The primary goal was to run in the 1:20s while the stretch goal was to run 1:20:00 and the lest I would walk away happy with would be 1:21:30. The goals were not just pulled out of thin air. I wanted to run 1:20:xx because if you plug that number into my personal equation for half-marathon to marathon time that puts me right at my goal of 2:46 for the full marathon. I wanted to run 1:20:00 flat because that would give me hope to break into the 2:45:xx for the full and the 1:21:30 would still give me a personal course record. I was up at about 5:30 AM for a quick shakeout before breakfast. We headed out right on time and made our way to Lawrence, IN which is a little less than an hour away. It was a cool morning with a little wind from the north that would end up having a noticeable effect in mile 7. We arrived and parked...

This was my big tune-up race for the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon. I always run a half-marathon at this point in the build up to the Monumental to get a final big fitness boost, a reality check on where I am at fitness-wise and, if all goes well, probably the most important aspect is the confidence boost that I get. I got one heck of a confidence boost yesterday, 10/25/2015, at the Valpohalf Half-marathon in Valparaiso IN. Valparaiso is about 2 hours from home which is kind of right there on the line of driving on race morning or staying in a hotel the night before. This time we decided to get up and drive. Valparaiso is on central time which puts it an hour behind us. Meaning the 8:30 AM start was really a 9:30 AM start for me.  Making the decision to drive that much easier. I have been dealing with some issues on the top of my right foot, which is probably extensor tendinitis, for the last couple of weeks. I saw my soft-tissue guy last Friday. He worked on it some and got...

This half marathon was less than 2 weeks out from the Boston Marathon. When I got my entry for Boston I knew this wasn't going to be a half that I would PR in but past that I wasn't really sure how I would do so I held off on setting any goals for this race until late last week. If you read my Boston race report you know it took a lot out of me. Honestly, I am usually way more recovered by now. I think it was Wednesday or Thursday before the race that I even attempted to set some vague goals. I was still feeling pretty beat up and on top of that I had gone to a couple of CrossFit classes earlier in the week and was suffering from a bad case of DOMS. So, I settled for the goals of sneaking in under 1:30 and getting a top 500 finish (special "500 club" medal for that). Even these goals were based mostly on vanity and not really on what I was confident that I could go out and do and as such they actually caused me a great deal of anxiety. This race has become a fami...

This is my second year in a row running this race but there was a huge difference this year. I am in the first week of "taper" for a very aggressive marathon training cycle. Last year I decided to run this race about 6 weeks out and didn't do any real focused training. I had been running long runs of any where from 10 to 12 miles every week or so. This year because I am following a high milage training plan I have been running long runs once a week as far as 22 miles and runs of 12 to 15 miles 2 times a week. I have been excited to run this race for a few weeks now. It is about 2 weeks out from my goal marathon so it was a great tempo training run with plenty of time for my body to absorb the physiological adaptations and make me that much stronger for the marathon. About a week ago my youngest daughter Hannah finished up the cross country season and began an intense off season training program on her own. I signed her up for the 5k as a baseline race for her to build h...

For my 40th birthday my wife got me, among other things, a Garmin Forerunner 610. I have never done a product review before and decided to do this one because after using the watch a single time I could see how much potential it has as a training tool. What can I say, when something positively impacts my life I want to share it so that someone else may benefit too. Instead of a single post however, there is so much that this watch does that the review will actually be a multi-part post of at least two and maybe more. It's hard to say because I find this watch more useful every time I run. A few key features that I want to hit in this post are the user interface, the GPS, and the lap/split functionality. First off, the user interface is very well done. The 610 is a touchscreen device and initially I thought that the touch interface was going to be problematic because it didn't seem responsive enough until I read the manual and followed the manufacturers reco...

The other day I got all caught up in setting running goals for myself for the rest of the year. After the goals were set, I found myself starting to worry about how I was going to reach them. Wondering if there would be time to sufficiently prepare for them all. My goals were to run a 5k in under 20 minutes, to run a half marathon in 1:25 minutes and qualify for and run in the Boston marathon in 2014. At first, I thought that setting and meeting these goals would make me a more serious runner. In fact, I thought that to be the "serious" runner I want to be that I needed these goals. However, while I was running the other morning I realized that first of all, I was thinking about how to shift my training to meet my 5k goal. Then I began thinking about the right approach to a 1:25 half while training to qualify for Boston in a full marathon a month later. That is when I realized that the ancillary goals were starting to consume my focus and quite possibly i...