Bring it on!

Today marks the first official day of my half marathon training journey. Having never run more than 10 miles consecutively, I’m a little nervous about running 15 miles as my longest run. But I’m sure just like Gloria Gaynor, I will survive.

 I recently joined a running group I found on meetup.com. I was a little shy to start running with a bunch of people I've never met before, but then I remembered how much I love the running community and how accepting most of them are. Yesterday, I went to my first group run. This “group” run turned out to be me and one other guy named Dale. Dale has been a runner since before my mother even had the twinkle in her eye. He has run over 52 marathons, his fastest being 2:34. To say I was intimidated would be an understatement. However, he is now 60 years old, so that gave me a bit of a handicap. We ran a 2 mile loop 3 times and did strides for the last 0.5mi on the last 2 loops. He let me set the pace. Which was nice, but I felt like I was holding him back. I thought about pretending to have contracted some strange new virus that left me weak and unable to run as fast as I normally was capable of, but I decided to save him the theatrics and just run.

For my training plans, I use an app called Runkeeper. It has a plethora of training plans from 5k to a full marathon. It even has a training plan for just losing weight. When you choose a plan it automatically loads it for you when you run and tells you when to speed up, or slow down, etc. It even tells you the pace you should be maintaining during each run. The best part, it’s a free app for the iPhone!

 Ok, enough of the Runkeeper commercial. For the past 4 months I was using the sub 60 min 10k training plan. I loved it; it helped me go from a 10:00/mi 5k to 8:30/mi. So I am putting my faith in this program for my half marathon. I signed up for the sub 2:15 half marathon training plan. Although, my goal is actually a sub 2:05, they didn’t have a plan for that, so I will just run the suggested paces a little bit faster. Now, before I go completely off track, Dale said if I sent him my training plan, he would tweak it to my fitness level and goals. He has been a running coach for 16 years and has coached some really elite athletes. So I am very much looking forward to his input. I am excited to be part of this new running group. He told me about some of the other runners, they all sound like the American equivalents of Kenyans, but I’m looking forward to the challenge I think I can learn a lot from them. I will have to channel my inner “little engine that could” to get through some of their planned workouts, but all I've got to say (at least for right now while I’m feeling brave) is “BRING IT ON!”

Is anyone part of a running group?

How have you liked it?