Here’s a look back at my training runs for my second half marathon.
I did a great job vastly improving my pace while training for my first half marathon, so I figured that if I continued with the same effort training for my second half that I’d probably beat some land speed records. Just kidding, I know statistics- it was highly unlikely.
Running pace
I was hoping though to continue to improve my pace, but I wasn’t really able to. I pretty much plateaued/slowed. I think there were two main reasons for this.
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I had three weeks of crap mileage. I was trying to follow the same Beginner level Nike+ Running coach 12-week training plan as I did the first time, but a week long work trip to Europe plus getting sick immediately after returning meant I skipped two long runs entirely and fell short by 20/22/11 miles in weeks 6/7/8 of training.
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The heat/humidity of the summer is killing me. So much easier to run in the cool spring. At some point later I want to look at some plots of my running pace and temperature.
Below I plot my running pace over the 12 weeks of training against a few different variables. Long runs are my Saturday “easy runs” where I don’t care about my pace. I don’t do any real speed training yet so the rest are just “regular” runs. In the top right I added to the plot an estimate of a comfortable/safe target pace for my half marathon race based on my training history.
If you’re a Nike+ user and want to make similar plots for yourself using the Nike+ api, find my R source code on my Github RunR repo.
My actual half marathon race pace overall was 11:10’ for a finish time of 2:26:16. Slower than my first half marathon in April, where I finished at 2:19:26 (10:38’ pace). If you’re interested, here are recaps of those races, the July Rock ‘n Roll Chicago and the April Chi-town Half.
Looking forward to some cooler weather for my next race in September.