10 Weeks to My Half Marathon

As I mentioned yesterday, I signed up for my first half marathon, which is my 1st goal on my 25 before 25 list.

Starting last January, I was 0% a runner, and only periodically active, I decided I would change that by boldly deciding that this year I would run a half marathon, a whopping 21km. And promptly began working towards it.

I signed myself up for a Daily Mile Account (where you can track your running, workouts, swims whatever) and along with one of my best friends took to the gym, the track and the roads. I tell you that first 5km nearly killed me.... and even if you run beside me today you'd think I have asthma from the sound of my breathing (my boyfriend's almost got me convinced).

Either way I worked at it hard until May when I ran 10km in 1h4min for the Scotia Bank Calgary Marathon Jugo Juice 10km (that's a lot of sponsors people). Then Summer hit, and with it I travelled to Italy, Colorado, Hawaii, Chicago, Ontario.....it seemed like every two weeks I was off some place else. My boyfriend would tease me about when I would get training for the Spartan Race we had coming up, and I'd keep putting it off until I was finally in Calgary for longer than it took for me to unpack my bags.

 Typical running look for me...nothing better than Wonder Under Leggings from lulu.

This Saturday I ran the University of Calgary, DinoDash 10km, and it took 2min longer than my first one back in May....and I only ran 3 times in the month preceding it. So although my lack of training didn't result in me declining too far, I certainly haven't improved.

Yesterday I took the plunge and committed myself to the Last Chance Half Marathon on November 11th. It's going to be cold, it's going to be long... but more importantly I'm going to be ready for it. The first part of that is making up a running plan and sticking with it.

Now there are tonnes of free running plans online. I found one I liked from Fitness Magazine for free. You can also find a free one on About.com ... or pay for one through Runner's World. In fact just googling beginner's half marathon program, will bring up just about any style plan you want.

I printed out some blank calendar pages and started pencilling runs in, along with the boot camps I'm already doing twice a week, and the dance classes I plan on starting soon.

You can follow me on daily mile, which I'll try to update daily, twitter where I'll tweet my runs, or here on my blog where I'm going to give honest to blog updates of my successes and failures along the way.