Four weeks after successfully running my first sub-20-minute 5K and beating my younger brother in the process, on a whim, I decided to run my first half marathon. I didn’t have a training plan, and I had never run more than 8 miles before. However, I was in peak physical condition, and I was running about 20 miles per week. How hard could it be to run a 13.1-mile half marathon in a race environment?
I had been sharing my newfound love of running with my co-workers and detailing my recent success at the 5K when one of my colleagues suggested that I run a local half marathon coming up that Saturday that he had signed up for. It was a Thursday when he told me about the race and even though there was little notice and no time to prepare, the idea intrigued me. Maybe I was a long-distance runner. Even though I did not have a training plan and only two days to go before the event, I signed up right away and began to work on my racing plan.
I had not yet discovered online race predictor calculators which I’ll discuss in detail in a future post, but I did have some training baseline to consider. I had just run a 19:49 5k which at 3.1 miles meant that I had averaged 6 minutes and 24 seconds per mile. I had regular weekly mileage of about 20 to 25 miles per week on my legs, and I had just run 8 miles in 60 minutes during a hard training session which meant I had run 7 minute 30 seconds per mile over that distance. Based on these data points I figured that I should be able to run sub 8-minute miles over the duration of a half marathon. 8-minute miles over the course of 13.1 miles is just under 1 hour and 45 minutes which sounded like a nice round number and became my goal.
It turns out that my co-worker had the same time goal, so we met up on race morning in St. Charles, Illinois on June 6th, 2004, and ran together at the start. St. Charles is an affluent suburb about 40 miles west of Chicago and is situated in the Fox River valley. The course was point to point starting on the east side of St. Charles at a local mall and ended on the west side of the town on the other side of the valley. That’s right, located in a river valley, downtown St. Charles is at river level while each side of town is quite a bit higher. The elevation difference is about 100 feet or the equivalent of a ten-story building. While the first half of the race would wind down to the river, the second half would be uphill! Not an ideal situation for a first-time half marathon with little to no preparation.
As the race began, my co-worker stayed with me for about the first half mile as I settled into my pace, and he quickly fell behind. This was still before I bought my first Garmin running watch, so I only had the mile markers on the course to guide me. I don’t have a log unfortunately of my mile split times, but I do know that I managed to keep every mile under 8 minutes, and I never pushed too hard. It was my first time attempting this long of a distance, and I didn’t have super high expectations, so I really enjoyed the race and even managed to keep my speed up in the 2nd half of the race as we climbed out of the river valley. The best part of the course was that after climbing completely out of the valley around mile 12 we headed back down to the downtown area which made for a very nice and fast finishing mile.
When all was said and done, I finished in 1 hour 41 minutes and 37 seconds with an average pace of 7 minutes and 45 seconds per mile. I was ecstatic! I decided I was a long-distance runner and signed up shortly after for another half marathon scheduled for September. I found a 12-week training plan at Runner’s World and set out to get fast!