Chapter 2 page 452 - half marathon class weeks #9-10

Week 9 of class was primarily designed to teach us how to drink water (from a cup at an aid station) - well, none of in our class were new to running so . . . we just did some general chatting instead.  Nothing learned this week - but I saw this picture on a blog and it cracked me up so . . . hope you smile too!

source

 Week #10 - Goal Setting (this was the week our class met with the north class . . . and I made some awesome new friends).  Our teacher explained that all of training runs had a certain pace - think about placing each of those different paces into a different "bucket".  Whatever "bucket" had the most runs in it is the pace in which a goal should be based on.  Does that make sense?  Let's say that you did 8 of your runs might be 10 minute miles, but you may have run 20 runs at 11 minute miles, and there might be 3 runs where you did 9 minute miles.  When attempting to set a race goal - it's best to look at which pace you've done the majority of your runs and go from there.  So in the above example, most runs were done at 11 m//m so you'll base your half marathon goal on an 11 m/m (use McMillan calculator to fine tune your goals). 

Our teacher strongly encouraged us to set 2 goals - a 'reasonable time' goal and a 'perfect time' goal.  These 2 goals are usually about 5-10 minutes different.  He did spend some time pleading with us that if we don't make our goal time that we MUST focus on finding something good from various aspects of the race (start, middle, pace, finish, etc).  As you may remember for my recent half, my 'reasonable time' goal was 2:59 and my 'perfect goal time' was 2:56 (based on McMillan calculator) . . . ended up with a 2:53:50 - woot!