Ha!

Last night I sat down and plotted out the training for the first of the four (eek!) half-marathons that I plan to run.  No biggie, right?  Just like doing two marathons in six months?  Actually, I am feeling remarkably good about this whole thing, so BRING IT ON!

I chose a half-marathon plan from about.com, which is a first.  It's called an advanced beginner plan, although I am not sure what that means...still looks considerably easier than the 'beginner' plan that I did for my last one.  I'm having to start with the week where you do the 10M run to be ready in time, but that's okay.  I'm still in decent shape from the last one, even though I took some time off in between.  In fact, that might prove to be a blessing in disguise since it gave me a break.

Things are going to get hectic this week due to travel, so I opted to try the 'speed' training tonight.  You run one mile as a warm-up, then do 2.5 at race pace, and finish with a mile cool down.  This was going really well except that I ran the 2.5 much, much too fast to start.  I think that this kind of training will require some practice for me since I've never tried to sustain my race pace for any amount of time before.  It's a great exercise and one that I'm looking forward to improving.  But today I didn't quite have it. I did meet my goal overall, but my pace was all over the place.

The weather felt great to start, a beautiful, Florida fall day.  What I mean by a Florida fall day is that it was still in the 80s when I started (90s with the heat index), but that the humidity was a mere 70%-ish and the dew point only in the lower 70s.  As I was running, the dew point went up to the mid-70s and the humidity increased because of  storms in the area, meaning that the end of my run was above the threshold of ick--which might also account for why my pace dropped.  And yet, it still felt about 100x better than the horribleness that was this summer.  Right now, for instance, I don't feel as though I am going to die by melting into a smelly ball of sweat.  Neat.