It’s been four years since I last ran the Staten Island Half Marathon and I remember it like it was yesterday. It’s easy to recall something that has made an impact on you, easier still if it had a PR attached to it and even easier if it happened with an injury. That race will forever go down as my most heartening run with the most beautiful, yet tough memories of what it means to run with heart. While I won’t venture beyond that, since it’s all in the past and has already been rehashed, what I will say is that I hope the lessons I took away serves me well this time around.
In the past few years I’m focused a lot on “the Marathon” and paid little attention to running or training for a half-marathon. For sure it’s a different race, and in fact all races deserve their own respect and therefore their own strategy and plan, which I’ve tried to follow to this point. The problem is that running two important, yet different, races two weeks apart poses a bit of a challenge when training. Since I’m doing just that, I’m left with the quandary of which to prioritize. This is more or less easily determined as I’m running the Half with specific goals in mind that supersedes those of the Marathon. That is not to say that it’s less important but only that my goals for the Marathon are less demanding. Still, I always try to run a good race so performing well is very important and has made my past twelve weeks of training interesting with varied runs and cross training targeting development and performance for both races. Only this past weekend had me doing a simulation run that saw me come up just short of my goal time. I’m trusting the real race will provide the missing positive factors that will influence the result I’m looking for. As it is, I’ve run two marathons back-to-back before, they were of the same distance and my strategy then was to simply treat the first as a long run and the second as a race. As I recall, it didn’t quite turn out that way and in hindsight I see now that I should have raced the first and just enjoyed the second. Suffice to say, I walked away lesson learnt.
On Sunday, which happens to be the same day of the Chicago Marathon – just throwing that in there – I will attempt to run in the shadow and wisdom of past races and hope to have an amazing time on my favorite half-marathon course in NYC. Although I’m told the course is slightly different from what I am used to – a bit more hilly – I can only hope it spurs me on to great things. Wish me luck as I carb-up this week and prepare to run my “race of the year.” The excitement just doesn’t get old around here! LOL.
runningwithfaith 