2014 Race Calendar – RaceFest

I’m now officially registered for the Charlotte RaceFest on April 12! This will be my final long run before my marathon on May 4 and is definitely the most daunting week on my training schedule. I mentioned it in an post last week, but the plan for April 12 is 23 miles, which will be the longest distance I complete before my marathon. My trainer recommended signing up for the half marathon because the rest of the group is training specifically for this run (I’ll have someone to run with!) and then just adding 5 miles before and 5 miles after the race. This is still a major mental hurdle for me as I have yet to finish a half marathon and think, “I could keep running for miles yet!” so I will be keeping this date circled on my calendar. I know I will have multiple weeks leading up to this distance which will push me beyond where I’ve ever been before – the farthest I’ve ever run at once was a half marathon, and over a 32 hour period I’ve done 17.5 miles broken into multiple segments (more on this tomorrow) – so by late February I’ll be getting into completely unknown territory! 

I’m still working on the final logistics of April 12, but my goal is to do 5-7 miles before the half marathon, so I’m thinking my run will start around 6:00am in order to get to the race start line and ready to run in the half marathon by 7:30am. Yikes! The race start is close enough to my house that one of my strategies is that I will run from my house to the race start so that I have to run back home after the race. The 5-7 miles I do before the race will be easy (after I manage to drag myself out of bed!) and then I’ll have crowd support and lots of people to run with / distract me as I get to the 18-20 mile range. After that, I just have to get back home with another 3-5 miles. It sounds like a manageable plan to me!

What’s your biggest mental hurdle right now? How are you planning to tackle it?

Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *