Half Marathon

Bethany and I ran in a half marathon on sunday which was my first running race and Bethany's second (she ran this one last year). I was vaguely aiming for a 1:40 time but since I virtually never run on flats or pavement I didn't really know what to expect. In the end I got 1:45 which I was happy enough with since I had only had about 3 weeks of steady training since the couple weeks off after Peru. I guess that means a lot more training though before the off road "marathon" in November!

A note about the training - I was feeling very unfit three weeks ago before getting back in to it so I decided it would be a good opportunity to experiment a bit since I knew I only had a short amount of time to get into decent condition for the race. I decided to follow a pretty strict regimen of hard interval training rather than mix of mostly steady-state stuff. I did only one long run of about an hour. My workouts included stair sprints, track sprints (400m, 200m, 100m), rowing intervals, various tabata interval workouts (20sec on, 10sec off, x8), some cycling. Aside from warm ups and cool down I was never going continuously for more than 1min 30sec, but everything was all-out.

In the end it seemed to have worked; I don't think I could have made more improvement in the time I had (at least not with the amount of effort I was willing to put forth) but three weeks really isn't long enough to make any real conclusions - the biggest gains are always made at the beginning of a training cycle anyway.

Here's the half marathon results: Half Marathon Results

And Bethany won a trip to Queenstown in the prize drawing so we got our money's worth!