Confidence Boost

The running gods have answered my prayers! Today I ran the Somerset Stampeed 1/2 Marathon. My time was 2:29:04, which beats my Seattle time by 16 minutes.

The course was extremely challenging, it was like running on the edge of a lasagna noodle, constant steep up's and down's the entire time. The majority of the course was on dirt which was good for my knee, the last 2 miles are basically a trail run through the woods which was a lot of fun. Conditions for this race were perfect, nice cool weather, mostly cloudy, not humid and it rained the night before so the parts of the course that were sand had been packed down.

I am extremely happy with the way this race turned out. I've been having trouble with my training and today gave me the confidence boost I needed to keep my head up and keep hammering towards Chicago.

Since the race...

...I've been having a heck of a time with my training. Everything feels 10 times harder. Physically my body is having issues handling the distances. I think this is due to the fact that I literally went from sitting on the couch to doing long distance training. It has only been 5 months since I started running, I ran a half marathon about 3.5 months after I started running and I'm approaching my full marathon. Even though my body hasn't been agreeing with me I am determined to finish this race. After the full I will probably take a small(ish) break from the long distances and focus on the shorter 10K distances and potentially a couple of halfs. We will just have to see!