This past Saturday was the 20th running of the Earth Day Half Marathon. After 19 years of the race starting and finishing at St.Cloud State University, this year's event moved to downtown with the start and finish at River's Edge Convention Center. I'm not sure how many of the 20 races I've done, but I'm pretty sure it is more than half of them. Over the years the course has changed slightly, but this year was quite different. With any change, there are always going to be upsides and downsides. These are purely my opinions, but I'd list these as upsides of the new course and venue:
Here are a few downsides that I noticed:
Overall the race went well. More specifically, the first 10 miles were great and the last 5K was a struggle. I was averaging a nice 8:47 per mile until mile 10. The last bit was a solid minute per mile slower. Yikes! Afterward, I was looking at the data my Garmin app gives me and noticing some of the data. Here is part of it: While we continued to look at the data, my son pointed out that there is such as thing as data overload. Some of the numbers my Garmin app gives me are pretty irrelevant to anything such as how many calories I might have burned in a particular mile. One thing we did notice, however, is that while my pace dropped, my heart rate did not. David said, "You were doing the work, just not getting the results." That made me feel a little better that data showed I was doing the work! With so much data, it's maybe best to grab a few bytes of data and spend more time running while less analyzing numbers. Deb was able to run a few miles until she took a tumble while checking her phone. Since she escaped with only a few scrapes, I can give her a hard time to look up while running. My friend Lorrie is using the run/walk method and finished her race at a nice steady rate. She is also doing the half at Grandma's in June, so it was a great start for her. Stephanie's husband is training for the Fargo Marathon and opted to jump into the race on Saturday for a nice training run complete with water stops and traffic control. He had a very nice race finishing in 1:52. Here we are before the start of the race. I committed the cardinal sin of race day outfits and wore a new shirt. Thankfully, I wasn't punished too much for that and got only a slight chafe under one arm. Since it had been cold up until race day, I guess my only opportunity to test drive the tank shirt would have been on the treadmill. I'm hoping the weather will warm up enough to wear tanks soon. I did a short run this morning in pouring rain...back to jackets and tights already.
Next up is the Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon as part of the Grandma's Marathon weekend races, June 22 in Duluth, MN. I'm going back into a similar training program I used for Earth Day using the last nine weeks. One thing I did notice looking at my training data was that my weekly mileage has been averaging around 27. In past training cycles, I tried to stay in the 30-35 mile range, so after resting some this week to recover, I'm going to kick up my mileage slightly. It is very important not to add too much mileage too quickly, but jumping up to 30 miles per week is only a 10% change, so very realistic. Happy Earth Day to the Earth and all its inhabitants and Happy Running--Missee
1 Comment
Patrick
4/25/2019 12:34:22 pm
It was a fun race! Thank you for the invite:)
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AuthorMissee and Stephanie are two Minnesota sisters and moms who love to run. We are not experts in running, parenting or anything else, but we do have years of experiences that may be helpful or entertaining to others. Archives
May 2020
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