I ran the 2010 NYC Half Marathon today. It was my first half marathon since I ran cross country in high school (roughly 15 years ago). Considering that, I’m rather happy with my finishing time of 1 hour, 49 minutes.
Even better, with the help of family and friends, I raised $2,150 for Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong foundation.
I started training in November of last year. I started off simply doing short 1 mile runs in the park with my dogs, but soon I was doing longer runs at the gym. Since December I’ve been running for about 1 hour a day, roughly 4 or 5 times a week. I did almost all my training in the gym. I’m training with a heart rate monitor, so I never push myself overly hard when I train. Typically I train at a pace of roughly 10 minutes per mile, keeping my heart rate between 150 and 160 beats per minute.
That slower training pace made me really unsure of what sort of race pace I’d be able to run and maintain. Turns out I stuck to a steady pace of 8:20 per mile. It just felt like a natural pace.
I’ll be running more races because this one was a lot of fun.
For posterity, here are my splits:
-------------------------------------- Location: 10 Kilometers Time of day: 8:39:08 AM Elapsed time: 0:51:38.21 Pace/mile: 08:18.90 -------------------------------------- Location: 15 Kilometers Time of day: 9:04:34 AM Elapsed time: 1:17:03.95 Pace/mile: 08:16.13 -------------------------------------- Location: 20 Kilometers Time of day: 9:31:17 AM Elapsed time: 1:43:46.92 Pace/mile: 08:20.95 -------------------------------------- Location: Finish Time of day: 9:36:27 AM Elapsed time: 1:48:58.00 Pace/mile: 08:19.07 --------------------------------------
