We Survived – Part 2

There is honestly so much going on right now, I feel a little remiss just talking about the half marathon, but that’s all I can wrap my head around right now. We are still selling the condo on the 15th, we are moving to an apartment on Saturday, keeping tabs on the house being built, and we won’t be in town on the weekend until 2015, but today is all about running and turkey.

It has been exactly 627 days since our first official 5K, and we can both honestly say we never thought we would get this far. 627 days is roughly 18 months, or a year and a half, and we were able to stretch that initial 5K into a half marathon. Thinking back on that day in March of 2013, we have come a long, long way. For our first 5K we had never even run 2 consecutive miles, and we couldn’t finish the entire thing without walking. We finished that race with an overall pace of 11 minutes and 9 seconds per mile. Today Jes, Kelly and I were all able to  run (or jog) the entire 13.1 miles without stopping. Our expected time was around 2 hours and 20 minutes, and our “stretch goal” was 2 hours and 15 minutes. Official results won’t come back until later tonight, but unofficially we came in at 2 hours and 13 minutes, yes all three of us,  which put us at 10 minutes and 9 seconds per mile, and I could not be more proud,. I don’t know how this compares to other people’s progressions, but shaving over a minute per mile off our initial 5K pace, and adding 10 miles of distance is a solid 18 month’s work if you ask me.

Jes and I learned a good amount about ourselves, and our personal motivations, during the entire training process and already know where we go from here. 2 hours and 13 minutes is definitely something to be happy about, but instead of continuing pushing the envelope for distance, we are going to try and get faster. We are already planning on running the Atlanta Hot Chocolate 15K in January, but our actual next goal is to run a 5K in less than 25 minutes. Pushing speed is not something that we’ve done before, so it will be a fun challenge and hopefully an easy motivator. I have no clue how long that will take, but it will allow us to return to a more “boot camp” style workout routine, which will be far easier than all of the long runs we have been on recently.

But for now – we are going to eat as much as we possibly can and bask in the post race joy of getting our first race medal!