Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Out with the....uh....slow?

It occurred to me this morning that I am about 12 days from my first half marathon of the fall/winter.

I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am. Some people love the marathon. The marathon is just not my thing.

I love the half marathon. I love everything about it. I love the training. I love the distance. I love the challenge. We all have our distances, and this is my favorite.  If there was a way for me to run more half marathons throughout the year, without sacrificing on my triathlon times, I would do it in a heart beat.

Besides loving the distance, the race that I'm doing is RNR Denver. I've been doing this race FOREVER. Literally, I ran it before it was RNR, when it was the Denver marathon, then there was a time that it disappeared and then came back. Over the years, the course has changed as RD's changed. It's been pretty much the same course for the last (maybe) 3 years, now.

I have a history with this race. This morning I wanted to see what my PR was for this particular course.

This might sound odd, but I needed a little bit of a confidence booster. I'm not really all that interested in Denver as much as it's a stepping stone to my PR attempt in Vegas.

I pulled up my times.

I realized that even when I've run slow, my current times are faster than my last PR on the Denver course. Not only do I have an opportunity to get a course PR. I could possibly get a half marathon PR here in Denver. It's not unrealistic.

Here I was thinking that it was going to be tough to even get a course PR, now I realize that I'm set up to have a really great race not just in Denver but also Vegas.

As I was writing down my previous times, I thought, "They don't even matter. All they'll do is hold me back."

Those old PRs don't mean anything anymore. Instead, I wrote down my goal for Denver and stuck it on my computer screen.

Running a half marathon isn't easy, but I'm ready for it. All I really have to do is focus.