It has been a long time coming, but finally this morning, I cracked the HM distance and ran my first ever Half Marathon! This has been something on my bucket list for the last few years, but whenever I get within reach of it (it seemed to always be once I reached 16k 🤔), something would happen - a car accident in December 2014 that laid me up for a while and put me in a deep dark funk; a friend going through some tough times who was trying to take back control of her life in 2015 so a group of us all signed up with her to walk a full marathon (which helped to get me out of my funk and showed me what I was capable of but I quickly learned power walking and running uses your muscles differently so running went on the back burner); severe tail bone pain resulting in the diagnosis of a mass in my uterus in the fall of 2015 requiring major abdominal surgery in early 2016 and a long slow recovery process (but it brought me to C25k and these forums! Yay!); a nasty fall on the ice in January of last year and a ruptured hemorrhagic ovarian cyst in January of this year, both laid me up for a while especially combined with ugly Canadian Prairie winters making it challenging to get outside to run at all. It felt like I was destined to not reach this distance ever but I committed to my local 20k trail race this fall and I was bound and determined to reach the HM distance this Spring so I could focus on hill training without having to worry about "Can I even run the distance on the flat?!?". This last week I've been on call and have been working non-stop with some high stress cases so running has been put on the back burner again while I just tried to get through the week and try to force some food down my throat (I wish I was a stress eater, but nope, I can't eat when my stress gets too high so it is small little bland snacks for me and fast food whenever I was able to finally get a meal- not great running fuel!). I didn't get much sleep all week but especially last night with a sick kiddo who needed some tending to. I woke up this morning too early and too tired but knew this was the day I had to run it. So a couple cups of coffee in the belly, a bagel for breakfast, drop kiddo off at school and head to the pathway.
I've been planning this run for a long time (years, if fact) so I knew if I ran the entire pathway with a little loop at the exhibition grounds and repeated the loop on the way back, I would be about 16k when I got back to the beginning. All I had to do was then run the loop I used to do for my 5kish runs and Voila! HM achieved. Sounds easy enough, doesn't it 😁? Gear on, running vest bottles filled with Tailwind (bumped up to about 3 1/2 scoops per litre of water), a little baggie of Dare real fruit gummies, a little bag of Cadbury chocolate mini eggs that I had squirrelled away from my family over Easter and a Sweet and Salty granola bar just in case stashed in the vest with some Kleenex (my allergies are in full force!) and off I went.
I was very careful to keep things nice and relaxed at the start. My predicted pace for my plan was around 7:11min per km so I tried to stick fairly close to that but really I wasn't obsessing over my watch, instead running on how my body felt and how easy was my breathing, running this as I would any other long training run. I met many walkers, and dog walkers today and lots of lovely birds hanging out beside and in the creek, many in cute little breeding pairs 🦆💕🦆. I felt quite good for most of the run, even attempting to drink from the bottles in the front of my vest while running 😳. It worked fairly well, but by 8k I was at my turnaround point so I stopped and ate a gummy as I turned around. These ones were quite large but very soft so quite easy to eat. I ate a couple more at 2-3k intervals, but then decided to just focus on the Tailwind unless I felt I was starting to flag a bit. At 16 1/2k I was able to go back to the car, take a large drink of water and wet down my buff to wipe my salty face. It was quite refreshing, but this is my old buff and it was fairly stretched out so getting it back on my head, it was a bit loose. I ran the last 5k quite strong and other than staring at my watch doing way too much mental math while trying to figure out how different the GPS from Garmin was going to be from my Runkeeper so where should I turn around to still have a little bit of time to walk post run without having too far to walk, I finished strong - Runkeeper 21.16k (I wanted to ensure I did the full distance and didn't cheat); Garmin 21.84 km. Yippee! No cheating! HM ran and I didn't even need the granola bars or Cadbury eggs. I guess I'll save them a treat for later.
I didn't run it as fast as I had hoped for my first attempt at it, but given I was just running on my own and have had quite a few missed runs lately, I just wanted to finish strong which I did. What now? A couple weeks of a few easy runs then on to my next HM plan to prepare for my trail race. If this plan doesn't have intervals and hills in it, I'll modify it to incorporate some in. I've had a lot of just straight runs and I am really looking forward to changing things up a bit this next go around plus getting back to my trails!!!! Can't wait! The ticks are out full force now, but that isn't going to stop me! I've got my new insecticide-impregated buff and will be using lots of bug spray and close body inspection at regular intervals on the runs and afterwards. It is time to get off-road!
I am so glad to finally have reached this milestone!!!
- what next?!! xxx 
I DID IT!!!! 10 MILES!!!!!! 🏃🏻♀️🥳
ChrisL's lightweight 2hr HM plan - how did I do?
I did it ! Woohoo 🙌 
Do I really need a HM or marathon training plan? 
