Half Marathon

I've decided that as well as using this blog to document my time in Odessa, I may as well use it to document my half marathon training, as it might help me keep a little more motivated. I've been wanting to do a half marathon for some time now, but I couldn't do one last summer as the one in my hometown has stopped and I had left for Russia before the Robin Hood Marathon in Nottingham.

A couple of weeks ago I saw that the date for the Robin Hood Marathon in Nottingham had been announced and that it was open for entries, so I rather impulsively filled in the form and paid the fee without giving it a second thought. Ten minutes or so later it did dawn on me that I had now in fact signed up to run further than I've ever ran before, and I did ever so slightly fill up with terror! 13.1 miles is A BLOODY LONG WAY.

Since being in Odessa I have been running 3-4 times a week, but it has mainly been aimlessly plodding around the park, simply running to burn off a few of the extra chocolate bars I've eaten. I also forgot to bring my Nike+ sports band, so I wasn't sure how long or far I had been running for.

However, the addition of a new gadget in my life has changed all of this in the last fortnight. I was lucky enough to receive a Garmin Forerunner 410 as a birthday gift from my mum, and now I have got the serious running bug back, and am running thinking about the half marathon and getting faster/fitter.

The Garmin does EVERYTHING, it is an insane piece of kit. It has GPS which means it really accurately tracks your runs and a heart rate monitor, which often just scares me as I have a freakishly high working heart rate (often I'm running at 102% of my max, which probably means I should have collapsed). It is definitely making me more motivated, and doing runs and knowing how far and fast I'm going has made me realise I have a small way to go until I get times that I will be happy with as I go to do the half marathon.

My average 5km time currently lies between 25 and 26 minutes, and I'd like to get this down to somewhere between 23 and 24 and I managed to do 10km in 53 minutes this week, which isn't too terrible. I am desperate to run the half marathon in under 2 hours - 1 hour 50 minutes would be a dream. I am going to aim to do a weekly update on here - I think it may help me feel that little bit more determined to shave a few extra seconds off and just push myself that little bit further, we shall see!