Here are my official results from the WDW Half Marathon from this past Saturday:

Clock Time: 1:35:52
Chip Time: 1:35:14
Overall Place: 246
Division Place: 24

And my Garmin data is available here – http://connect.garmin.com/activity/22331046.

Overall, I’m very happy with my results. 246th overall out of over 17,000 finishers is pretty decent. I was about a minute off of my PR, but considering the weather I’m not surprised. It was below freezing at the start, and started raining/snowing/sleeting just before we headed over to the start line. It turned into a light but steady rain just before the gun went off, and stayed that way the whole time. I got a pretty bad cramp around mile 7, so that slowed me down a bit. Other than that, I felt pretty good the whole time.

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The weather did not cooperate with me this weekend, so I had to run 10 miles on the treadmill. Universal Sports played the last 10 Ironman World Championship races back-to-back on New Year’s Day, and our TiVo recorded most of them. So I was able to watch those while I ran, which helped with the boredom somewhat. I was actually surprised at how it went, once I passed the 4 or 5 mile mark. I usually have to really push myself to keep running past that point when I’m on the treadmill, but really had no problem with it. And if we hadn’t had something else scheduled for the morning, I might have tried going for 12.

So now that the race is less than a week away, I just have one more easy run tonight, and a short tempo run on Wednesday. I may try to get in a few easy miles Thursday or Friday as well, just to keep from getting stale.

We’re less than three weeks away now from our trip to Disney for the WDW Half Marathon.  The training has been a bit more relaxed than I usually am, but I hope that I can still do well.  The first three or four weeks of the training was taken up by the end of Insanity, and since then it’s been a struggle to find the time and daylight to get runs in.

To make things a little bit easier for ourselves, we bought a treadmill at the beginning of October, and it’s certainly helped.  I have still been doing my long runs outside, since I try to keep my treadmill time to a minimum.  But I have gotten up to doing 10 miles, and my pace was faster than I trained with in the past, so hopefully that bodes well.  Also, I think Insanity really helped with my core strength.

I’ll try to get another good Tempo run in this week, and another set of good mile repeats next week, then we’ll start to taper as we get set to travel.  The course is much flatter than the Oak Brook course, so even if my fitness is the same as it was then, I should be able to improve my time.  I’ll hopefully post some more training details as the next couple of weeks progress, but I’m looking forward to this race, and I hope it goes well for both of us.

Today was my fourth consecutive Naperville Sprint Triathlon.  I wasn’t expecting too much from the swim and bike since I haven’t been in the water since this same race last year, and have only biked a handful of times in the same period, but felt fairly confident in my running ability with hoping half marathon training would carry me through.  Well, I guess I was all wrong, since my swim and bike times were only seconds off my fastest splits, and my run was over a minute and a half slower.  And I lost almost another minute in the transitions.

The 400m pool swim start, besides taking almost 40 minutes to get in the water, was fairly uneventful.  I got a good start, and stayed pretty consistent when I wasn’t trying to get around slower swimmers.  I got out of the water, and felt pretty good, a quick look at the clock had me estimate my time around 9:00, which I thought was pretty good for my fitness – official time 8:07.

It’s a decent run from the pool to the transition area, and I was a bit out of practice, so the T1 time was a bit over 4:00.  Then on to the two-loop bike course which had a few hills.  It was also pretty windy this morning on the course, which hurt heading south, but felt great coming back north.  Altogether, I was able to average a 19.7mph speed, with a finish time of 41:42, seven seconds faster than last year.

T2 was pretty uneventful, I switched shoes, grabbed my hat, and was off running in just under 2:00.  As soon as I started running, I knew I was in trouble.  Usually my legs feel sluggish getting off the bike, but my Garmin shows my pace right in line with a normal 5K time.  Today, I felt extra sluggish, and I was barely faster than my normal easy run pace.  I really struggled to stay under 7:45/mi pace for the first half mile, and was able to slowly pick up the pace.  My third mile, I finally felt good and got into the low 6:00/mi range.  There was another runner over the last quarter mile or so who was trying to kick it in around my speed, so we kind of paced each other in, and my final 5K run time was 22:03.

Overall, I was satisfied with my effort, I just envisioned losing time on the swim and bike, not the run.  I finished in 1:18:07, for 249th place overall, out of over 1,700 finishers, and 25th place in my age division.  Considering I was not properly trained for it, I’ll definitely take that.

Saturday was my Long Run day, and it seemed to go pretty well. I was able to keep my pace fairly consistent for the whole eight miles, and actually felt pretty strong in the end. The Garmin data is available here.

I only did pushups and Ab Ripper on Wednesday, so I will be restarting Week One of the Hundred Pushup Challenge tonight, followed by Ab Ripper X. This is my first recovery week for half marathon training, so it’s just three days of easy mileage.

Thursday was the Dan Gibbons Turkey Trot 5K. I didn’t really know what to expect since I haven’t been running as much, and hadn’t done any speed work when I did run. However, Megan had taken a class for PTs to treat runners, and the instructor preached the importance of core strengthening. She mentioned a stat about a significant improvement to running times by changing nothing but adding core strengthening. So I though that maybe I had a shot with all of the core work during P90X.

I lined up race morning with the 6:00 pace group (they had signs out), and waiting for the start. It was a fair amount of people, so I wasn’t surprised to not move right when the gun went off, but I was surprised to find people walking with strollers lined up in front of me. Apparently they just let people stream in from the sides, and everyone got in at the front, making it extremely difficult for me to get a good start. I spent the first half mile weaving in and out of people, and only being able to go 7:30-7:45 pace. When I was finally able to pick up the pace, I was pretty steady at about 6:15, but the damage had been done, and my first mile was 6:55. After that, I was in the 6:00 range, and kicked it in hard to cross the finish in 19:45. Had I been able to start unobstructed, I could have easily cut off another 30 seconds, and maybe a minute – which would have been a PR.

I’m not going to complain about it, but it is good to know that P90X has helped me improve my running. Now I just need to take this gained strength, add in some decent run training, and start kicking some serious butt in the spring.

Also, this is now my final week of P90X. I’ve done two days so far, tomorrow is basically and off day, then two more days, and off day, and I’ll take the Fit Test again on Saturday. I’ll post all of my results then, hopefully there’s some decent improvements.

The final results are in from the Oak Brook Half Marathon, and I’m fairly happy with how it turned out. The course was nice, with mostly rolling hills, and a few pretty big hills to make it a bit tougher. I was able to stick to my pacing strategy of 7:30 for the first 10, and I picked it up for the last 5K to average 7:20/mi (1:36:01). My splits were:

Mile 1 – 7:14
Mile 2 – 7:24
Mile 3 – 7:24
Mile 4 – 7:31
Mile 5 – 7:36
Mile 6 – 7:29
Mile 7 – 7:30
Mile 8 – 7:24
Mile 9 – 7:30
Mile 10 – 7:15
Mile 11 – 7:10
Mile 12 – 7:06
Mile 13 – 6:55
Final 0.1 – 0:26

I finished 101st overall, and 5th in my age division. Full results are available here.

I’ll be running the Oak Brook Half Marathon on Labor Day, my first stand-alone half marathon. After running slower than I’ve done in training for the run portion of the Half Ironman, I’m looking to redeem myself in this, and actually try to race it. I felt good during my run today, and I tried to simulate the race to some extent.

I went 10 miles, planning on running the first 8 at 7:45 pace, and the last 2 at 7:30, which is the pace I hope to run next Monday. I was able to run the 7:45 pace for the first 8, and ran 7:10 for mile 9, and 7:07 for mile 10! I’m hoping to be able to run 7:30 for the first 10 miles in the race, and see what I can do for the last 5K. If all I can do is hold 7:30, or even drop to 8:00, I’d be OK with that. If I can pick it up like I did today, I’d be even happier.