Seattle Half Marathon - Good Day

Today was a long hard training run at the Seattle Half Marathon. It ended up being a good day.

This race is notorious for it's bad weather but today was clear, windless and cold which was a blessing. The plan with my coach was to focus today on effort and running negative splits.

I got to the race 40 minutes before the start and got stretched and headed out for a little 20 minute warm up run. I ran into a guy I used to run with in high school during my warm up which was fun he was hoping to run low 1:20's so that would be the last I'd see of him for the day as he would be ahead of me all day. I got to the start about 5 minutes before the gun and worked my way towards the front.

I got started out at a pace which felt very comfortable but I knew it would be a little faster than I'd like as it always is. I hit the first mile in 6:25 and backed off to the mid 6:40's. I focused on really holding back a bit through the next couple of miles and continued to roll along with mile splits in the 6:40's.

At mile 7 I started to increase the effort level a bit and started moving up on some of the other runners just ahead of me. This is also where we hit the tough hills on the course. After a 7:10 mile in mile 8 which included a steep long hill, I got into a pace pushing sub 6:40's which included a 6:27 in mile 12. I finished strong with a good sprint in the final 300 meters to finish in 1:28:00.

I was happy with the performance as I ran negative splits as planned which is tough on this course with some serious hills in the second half of the race. First half split was 44:09 and the second half split was 43:50 with an average of 6:43 per mile. Best of all my tendinitis didn't bother me too much and I felt like I could have kept going at this pace. All in all a good day.

Overall things are progressing nicely with training. It looks like I'll be headed to Tucson in March for a 5 day training camp with Peter Reid and Peter Cross. This will be a bike focused camp so I'm expecting some serious ride mileage over those couple of days and a planned long ride weekend in April in Coeur d'Alene.