Training for a half marathon

It's that time again! I signed up for the half marathon in Vancouver and will be running it solo for the first time this year. I have ran every single race with Jean-Louis since I first started racing in 2002. It's definitely going to feel weird without him running next to me.

Now that it's April and the race is next month, I have to crank it up a few notches and run more. I have been so bad because I let myself gain maybe 5-10 pounds over the Fall and Winter. I'm thinking it's more like 10 pounds :( Of course, having a food blog right now doesn't help either. Lol. However, the good news is this past winter was probably the first winter we did not stop running. We normally throw in the towel around November and don't run at all again until maybe March. This past Fall and Winter, we ran right through even when it snowed a bit, or rained, or was terribly freezing outside. When it was pouring rain, we canceled. We aren't that hardcore! We still ran a couple times a week. Jean-Louis ran probably 3-4 times a week since he ran with his coworker at work. Needless to say, he doesn't really need this race. I do.

So the plan is for me to run a bit harder, do the half-marathon and then be at the point where I can start training a bit more seriously with Jean-Louis later in the year for a full marathon. I'll be registering us for that soon. As for my current plans, my temporary gym membership will expire in two weeks and then I will be running maybe 4-5 times every week. I'm going to start running 3-4 times every week now. Some people may think we are a little nuts to train for a 21.1KM race by running only 5-10KM but that's what we have pretty much always done and it has worked well for us so far. Seriously. We run half the distance of our race many many times and then we just assume we can run twice the distance when race day comes. Works for us.

At this point, I can truthfully say that I'm not ready. I can probably run a 10KM very slowly but for the past 4 months or so, I have only ran 5KM at a time. Sad, isn't it? I feel heavy and need a bit more weight to come off and I just need to run more and run further to build some confidence. I'm also a bit worried about missing a week of training because we will be away on vacation. We might try to fit in running somehow during vacation but it would be much simpler if we didn't. Okay, I'm not going to start stressing about this yet! I have like a month still to train. That's a lot, right? Okay good :)