Forums >Racing>Sub 1:30 Half Marathon in 2020
Mother of Cats
63 milesM: Upper body weights/core and streaming yogaT: 12.5 miles outside, including a mile pace workout - 4x(2x200+400) with equal distance recovery after each rep. Splits were 41, 42, 84; 42, 42, 85, 42, 42, 84, and 41, 41, 84. Followed with leg strengthwork and streaming yoga.W: 7 miles very easy outside (9:04), streaming yoga, 7 miles very easy on treadmill (9:03), plus drills and four strides.Th: Upperbody weights/core in morning; streaming yoga in afternoon.F: 12.5 miles outside, including a workout of 2 mile, 1 mile at tempo effort, and then 4x.25 miles a bit faster. Splits were 12:55 (6:24/6:31); 6:27, 86 (stopped too soon), 94, 93, 93. Recoveries of 4:4x after the tempo segments; 60 seconds between the quarter miles. Followed with some leg strengthwork and streaming yoga.Sa: 10 miles easy outside (9:21) then drills and two hill strides plus streaming yoga.Su: 12 miles progressive, split as first four averaging 9:21, next four averaging 7:54, next four averaging 7:07. Followed with a 2 mile cooldown, leg strengthwork, and streaming yoga.
I'm starting to add more quality during the week, so I'm pulling back on my mileage and also the length of my long run until I (hopefully) start marathon training in early August (current goal marathon is Indy/Harrisburg/Richmond, under the hope that at least one of them will happen. Indy is my first choice, if it's a go). I've got a tentative race schedule in mind that includes a mile race on July 25, possibly a 5K in Delaware in early August, and then the Fargo 10K in late August. Obviously nothing's certain in these times, but seems like these have a reasonable chance of happening.
James D. - I saw the video - not hobby joggerish at all, IMHO.Piwi - nice solid week for youMarky_Mark - great MP workout. I like that one more than the last one :PWatson - good build.
Referring back to earlier - DPS - I also agree that you have much faster in you - and I know you know that. I hope you get a shot this fall.Commander Keen - I think races will happen in October/November, and earlier. You just need to be willing to travel.
Everyone's gotta running blog; I'm the only one with a POOL-RUNNING blog.
And...if you want a running Instagram where all the pictures are of cats, I've got you covered.
Watson- nice week.
Darkwave - good to see you have some prospects of races happening too!
Question for the experienced marathoners on here... my goal marathon has some hills in it. The total elevation gain is around 200m / 650 ft. There are basically 6 hill climbs, 3 of these are relatively gradual ones which I'm less worried about, but there are 3 I'll need to think carefully about. One particularly nasty one just before the halfway mark (about a half-mile climb with a 9% grade) followed by a couple of short, sharp ones (both around a quarter-mile climb with ~6% grade).
On race day I'll aim to run to even effort and not kill myself on these hills... but for those who have run Boston or other hilly courses, did you do any specific hill training at or around MP/effort and how did you manage it? I'm thinking I'll incorporate some hills in my MP tempo blocks and try to get a feel for the pace/effort trade-off.
3,000m: 9:07.7 (Nov-21) | 5,000m: 15:39 (Dec-19) | 10,000m: 32:34 (Mar-20)
10km: 33:15 (Sep-19) | HM: 1:09:41 (May-21)* | FM: 2:41:41 (Oct-20)
* Net downhill course
Last race: Waterfront HM, 7 Apr, 1:15:48
Up next: Runway5, 4 May
"CONSISTENCY IS KING"
Mark when I ran the half there a few years ago, a couple weeks before the race I got my wife to drop me at the bottom of that hill at the top of the lake and I ran up just to get a feel for it yes I was over prepared
I think your Auckland hills will prepare you well. Get used to how much you slow at MP when running similar hills it's a bit worse than Auckland but not too bad.
Darkwave good to see you also run 9 min pace . Nice consistent weeks for you.
Watson good steady improvement coming out of your injury.
55+ PBs 5k 18:36 June 3rd TT
" If you don't use it you lose it, but if you use it, it wears out.
Somewhere in between is about right "
Piwi - no shame in being prepared! When I was training for my first half marathon which was Auckland HM back in 2015, I wanted to get a feel for the hills. Of course it was impossible to practice the Harbour Bridge but I did realise that there is a hill up in Albany going up to the mall which is almost identical. So I included that in many of my long runs!
I am OK with hills as I run them a lot. Just trying to get a feel for how to manage MP effort on them and how they'll impact pace.
Watson- nice week. Darkwave - good to see you have some prospects of races happening too! Question for the experienced marathoners on here... my goal marathon has some hills in it. The total elevation gain is around 200m / 650 ft. There are basically 6 hill climbs, 3 of these are relatively gradual ones which I'm less worried about, but there are 3 I'll need to think carefully about. One particularly nasty one just before the halfway mark (about a half-mile climb with a 9% grade) followed by a couple of short, sharp ones (both around a quarter-mile climb with ~6% grade). On race day I'll aim to run to even effort and not kill myself on these hills... but for those who have run Boston or other hilly courses, did you do any specific hill training at or around MP/effort and how did you manage it? I'm thinking I'll incorporate some hills in my MP tempo blocks and try to get a feel for the pace/effort trade-off.
For a hilly marathon, I always think it's best to prepare by doing marathon effort runs on similar terrain. Hill repeats are wonderful and good for you in all sorts of ways, but they are for power development, not for getting better at hills in a race context. What you want to focus on is getting better and more comfortable with maintaining a mostly even effort on rolling terrain.
And....you have half-mile at a 9% grade in your marathon? One of our local races (RnR DC) has a .15 mile hill at just under a 10% grade. It's absolutely brutal - I've found the best strategy is to power walk parts of it.
DPS congrats on doing anything while your kids are in that newborn stage. She's cute but also undoubtedly exhausting. Congrats on the 2:48 as well. 18 months of continuity! I am both impressed and jealous.
Flavio - hopefully the drugs continue to work! Glad to hear you can run pain free.
James - solid week, you've been consistent lately.
Piwi , DW, Mark- ditto.
Watson - how's the hammy holding up?
As a newly minted ultra runner I can say power hiking steep is smart =) but in a marathon?? eek.
My week was almost nothing. My body just hasn't been ready to do much so I ran 15 miles over 5 days and swam almost 3 miles. I would have swam more but I kayaked across a (no-wake) lake while my son swam and we were set to switch spots when the DNR rolled up blowing a whistle and very angry. Apparently there's absolutely no swimming outside the marked swim area (which was so crowded, the idea of swimming there was a joke). So that sucked. Sunday we had a socially distanced picnic with my parents at a park followed by borrowing Dad's boat to let the kids kneeboard. It was totally worth the 5 hours of driving.
1600 - 5:23 (2018), 5k - 19:33 (2018), 10k - 41:20 (2021), half - 1:38:57 (2018), Marathon - 3:37:17 (2018)
Intl. correspondent
Zebano - careful now, let those tendons recover properly.
I'm thankful just a couple of pills that day did the trick to get the PF away, I hate taking pills.
All around great weeks here.
me - I keep going with my slow comeback after the plantar fasciitis scare earlier in the week. It seems I've developed some bad habits since the lockdown is over cause I'm gaining weight super fast again. Gonna have to use some super smart tricks to trick my mind into not eating so many pastries.
PRs: 1500 4:54.1 2019 - 5K 17:53 2023 - 10K 37:55 2023 - HM 1:21:59 2021
Up next: some 800m race (or time trials) / Also place in the top 20% in a trail race
Tool to generate Strava weekly
eek. is my response to any marathon that would have a 1/2 mile hill at a 9% grade...
DW fair enough. I just have trouble wrapping my heart around walking when racing even if my head understands it.
Flavio - thanks for the words of caution. I'm going to continue to take things day by day and see how I feel. Good luck, with the weight, I've done the same thing according to my last two weekly weigh ins, so it's time to get that fixed. Sadly eating habits are much harder for me to deal with than running ones.
Also, humidity and heat seems to be here to stay, I'll just add that I am not pleased. I need to start running regularly at 5:30AM just to not overheat.
I'm still perusing, but mainly want to say welcome back Kimba! Glad you're back, was thinking about you a couple of weeks ago as someone I thought would stick around but then disappeared.
Lol. Thank you! I'm glad you thought well enough of me to think about me in my absence ;-) And thanks to all the others for welcoming me back . Aside from my injury, which totally pissed me off and gave me a bad attitude about all things (and people) running, my aunt also had a stroke in February, so things were extremely stressful, hectic, sad, etc. Oddly, it actually worked out well that I wasn't running because that freed up a lot of time and energy to help my aunt (she has no kids of her own, so my sister and I are the ones who tend to fall into the role of caretaker, me especially because I'm a PT).
I've caught up a bit:
Zebano - wow! What a report and race! I guess one should never say never, but I can't ever imagine doing a marathon, let alone an ultra! And sorry, I forgot in what part of the world you reside. I saw your comment about humidity. Here in New England we've had it pretty bad for several days recently. It's absolute murder for running. But, I like to think that there is some training benefit to training through it - I think I read that somewhere. So, I'm trying to just suck it up and do my runs as best I can in hopes that come fall I will be the better for it.
DPS and JMac - congrats on the baby front! JMac, I see you moved? Are you still in NYC?
Flavio - pf is a tough one and sometimes just needs to run its course. However, you should look into strengthening the intrinsic muscles of your feet as well as the muscles of the lower leg. Foot muscles are often involved, yet often neglected in treatment and prevention. Let me know if you'd like some ideas.
I'm hanging around the 30-35 weekly mileage mark. That seems to be my sweet spot. I seem to get injured when I go above that. So, I've been adding in some tempos recently and have done a few bouts of short hill sprints. I went to the track today to get some turn over and was pleased to average 38-40 seconds on 2 sets of 4 x 200 with 200 jog recovery, 400 jog between sets. It didn't feel terribly taxing which was surprising; I kind of expected to struggle to hit 42-45. I guess all the lifting and biking and stuff I was doing while injured helped. I don't have any race to train for, but at least I can mix up my training to keep myself motivated.
One more thing I've been doing since I left these boards -- so, I got furloughed from my job (our company asked for volunteers to take leave, and I volunteered). During that time I've decided to go full board with starting my own mobile/telehealth PT business. I've been learning all the things I need to be able to do this, including building a website, which I have never done before. It's not fully done, but it's mostly there. Check it out if you're interested! www.evolveptri.com
Happy running!
800m: 2:20.3 (2015) | 1 Mile: 5:13 (2016) | 5K: 18:32 (2010) | 10km: 39:55 (2012) | HM: 1:28 (2013)
Cobra Commander Keen
James - Good week. Doesn't look like hobby jogger-ish form to me.
Piwi - Nice week - Workouts trashed my legs last week, too! Looks like a good VO2Max session to me.
Mark - Good week again. Definitely maintain effort on the uphills and don't worry about the pace going up those. Routinely running a hilly route on easy days alone helps, but certainly if you can get in a couple M-effort runs on similar terrain that would be ideal. Sounds like you've already good things planned well.
DWave - Good week. I agree that races will be happening in that time frame (just perhaps not ones that are on the coasts and/or super-large ones). I'm looking into a number of marathons in the late October/early-mid November time frame that will all involve a flight or a minimum of 4 hours of one-way drive time - Indy being one possible option. I do wish I could get your air travel rates, though! Oklahoma seems to be a geographical oddity - $200 round trip from everywhere.
Flavio - PF not giving you any more problems, I hope? I recently had to address some food habits myself. I wasn't able to convince DW not to come home from the grocery store with various nuts and dried fruits (because I'd eat all of them immediately), so I had to teach myself how to avoid them.
Kimba - Sorry to hear about your aunt - how's she doing now? Sharp looking website.
Pretty solid week, though my legs aren't used to 2 workouts/wk and I cut 4 miles from my run Friday due to that. Going forward I'm going to aim for smaller workouts to make sure I can get through both of them properly without killing myself. I'm way out of 5k shape right now, but I'm looking to build that back up before the end of summer. Over the weekend a dust cloud from the Sahara settled in over the state. Things looked pretty hazy farther out than ~1/4 mi but thankfully it didn't affect my breathing and it's moving on - this yearly cloud doesn't usually reach OK like this.
5k: 17:58 11/22 │ 10k: 37:55 9/21 │ HM: 1:23:22 4/22 │ M: 2:56:05 12/22
Upcoming Races:
OKC Memorial 5k - April 27
Bun Run 5k - May 4
Zebano - I wouldn't worry about the mileage, you're smart to just listen to your body in the recovery phase after that sort of distance.
Kim - hope it goes well!! A lot of providers here experimented with virtual services during our lockdown. The only ones that really nailed it were Sportslab. One thing they did - and have continued to do - was also have a pretty active social media platform with general tips for flexibility, injury prevention and those sorts of things being put up regularly. Just helped keep them front of mind with clients I guess.
Keen - I was gonna say that Sahara dust clouds seem a long way from home but we had smoke from Australia back in summer. Nice week.
DWave/Keen - thanks for the thoughts. Sounds like plugging some hills into my MP effort work will be the best way to go. My long runs are normally on rolling terrain anyway which may help.
JamesD
Kimba - Website looks good. Is the "we" just you for now?
Keen/Mark - My area seems to have barely missed the worst of the Saraha dust cloud, which I read today also includes traces of dried camel dung. We only had some haze on Saturday, even though Atlanta (90 miles away) had an air quality advisory.
Post-1987 PRs: Half 1:30:14 (2019); 10K 39:35 (2019); 5K 19:12 (2017); Mile 5:37.3 (2020)
'24 Goals: consistency, age-graded PRs, half < 1:32
Yes, it’s just me. And I struggled with that throughout. It feels weird to say “I do this and that, and here’s how I can help.” We just sounds more professional. So, I guess as long as it’s consistent throughout site I’m okay. Did you find inconsistencies?!?