Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Race Goals

My half marathon in California (Disneyland!) is in 5 days. I'm very excited. It's not my first race, or my first race at this distance, but it's the first where I truly am setting goals. I'm going with the safe/probable/stretch goal trio.

* Safe - beating my first half marathon time. Since that was based on much less running experience plus injury plus a nasty cold, it would probably take asteroids to keep me from beating this. Or really long lines at character picture stops.

* Probable - Time goal of < 2.5 hours. It's a nice goal number and reachable, based on training calculators. It's what I will be aiming for. And it's the first time I will be watching my time before the last mile to figure out what I need to do to make it. Hope my brain is warmed up along with my feet, because there's some math a comin'!

* Stretch - Average of 10:30 per mile. This is a stretch goal but maybe not as stretchy based on recent training runs. I have to be careful with this one - don't want it as primary because I could see myself starting out too fast (common problem) and running out of steam aiming for this. It's more of a "we'll see how it goes, and grow from here" goal.

I'm way excited for this race. Disney does a great race from my first experience, plus I'm running in an area I've never been to before. Double fun! Just based on that, I expect to be happy. If I hit one goal I'll be extra happy. If I hit two, I'll be ecstatic. Three - you'll have to talk me down from the moon.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

So much to say...

I've been doing a lot more thinking of blogging than actual blogging recently. And by recently I mean the last two years. But then again, why blow a streak?

So...
* I just came back from vacation a week and a half ago. It was hella awesome as always; it was a vacation to my favorite place in the world. I won't go into details because it would be a lot of text with no pictures, but suffice to say that when I was running a week in a half into the two week trip I caught myself thinking that my thighs didn't rub as much when I was running at the start of the trip. Success by any measure!

* I'm about to go back on another vacation. Yes - I do actually work, it's just for some reason I tend to cluster a lot of trips together. Which can be unfortunate because of my bad habit of always thinking ahead, and never living in the now. My brain is already on vacation, which means that basically what I said before about working? Eh - not so much.

* The vacation mentioned in the immediately prior point is to DISNEYLAND. ALL CAPITALS, WELL DESERVED. And as part of it, I'll be running a half marathon. Or to put it more correctly, the Disneyland trip is because I am running the half.

* I've never been to Disneyland. I expect to enjoy it. I will be going with my mother. The last two sentences do not contradict each other. Mom and I have gone to WDW multiple times and loved it; I expect the same with this trip.

And that's it for now. I know I had a lot more to say, but here's to breaking the blogging brain backlog!