When I woke up this morning I can honestly say that I was excited that today would see me complete day 2 of my half marathon training. It is so nice to wake up knowing that you have a plan in place when it comes to your daily exercise, however I was not excited about the weather forecast. Rain, Storms, and strong winds. Fortunately the rain held off until I got home, but the wind was blowing hard during my run, and the chill in the air told me that fall was well on its way. Lets see how I done today.

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Win aside, today was actually a pretty good day for running. The temperature was a nice 63 degrees, but the wind chill made it feel like the mid 50′s. With the rain clouds rolling in I decided to get started. The training plan I am following called for me to complete a 2.5 miles run while running slightly faster than my long distance running pace. I thought running slightly faster would not be an issue today because I was motivated by the rain clouds, but the wind stopped me in my tracks. Running with the wind at my back was great, but running into the wind was a killer, and to top it all off the section of the track I would be running into the wind on was uphill, but I done my best to plow through.

I ended up running just slightly past the 2.5 mile goal and hit a time of 29m:8s, so I was pretty happy with that. If I had carried on running at that pace I would have completed a 5K run in  roughly 33 minutes, which would have seen me beat my personal best by 2 minutes. During my first run I tried to run as much as I could with hardly any walking, and by the end of the run I was spent, so I decided to try something different today. Going to back to how the C25K program was structured (run, walk, run) I decided that I would try to incorporate that into my run today, so I decided that I would run for 5 minutes, walk for 1 minute and then run again for 5 minutes. I really should have done this the other day, because it really does make things so much easier. The whole challenge of running becomes much easier because you are not chasing the next mile, you are only chasing the next 5 minutes, and when you break things down into smaller chunks they become easier to digest. By the end of the run I felt great, and not spent at all. I actually felt like I could keep on going, which is exactly how I hoped I would feel. Tomorrow is another rest day from running, but I will be doing some cross training. No P90X this week means I will be using the recumbent exercise bike to get my daily workout in, and I will probably also do a round of Turbo Jam. It will be interesting to see how things go on Saturday. The program calls for me to run the designated distance of 3 miles at my long distance running pace, so I am going to try and do the 3 miles with no walking breaks. I should be able to do this because I will not be running at a pace that makes me feel uncomfortable. I will for sure post about how things go, but for right now, I am really happy with how the first 2 days of training have gone. Hope everyone has an awesome day.

All the best,

Brett