One last endurance event of year. I’ve been talking about running the OUC Half-Marathon for years. About four years ago, Lady CurbCrusher told me to either quit talking or run the darned race. So I quit talking about it until this year. Earlier this year I was talking on the phone with a friend that had started running again about a year ago. He was talking about running the Disney Half-Marathon in January. I suggested that we both run the OUC Half and we signed up.

This was my first long distance running event. I really hate running. But I put a lot of effort into trying to get into shape for this, and was able to survive. The first weekend in November I went and and ran the course by myself and finished in a time of 2 hours and 46 minutes. I used a run-walk-run method that I’d ready about years ago, run a mile walk a minute. That gave me a baseline, and by Thanksgiving I’d decided that I was shooting for a 2:30 time on race day. After the Turkey Trot, I re-thought my race and decided that if I finished under 2:40 I’d be happy.

In the meantime, I talked to some people and they described a different run-walk-run method that had you run x minutes and then walk y based on the mile pace you want to maintain. I read some of this, and at the Highlands Hammock Turkey Trot, I used this method for the race. I was now torn between using something that I knew worked for the long distance on race day (run a mile walk a minute) and trying this new method.

I finally compromised. I used the run a mile walk a minute method for the first 10 miles. That leaves 3.1 miles or a 5K. I switched to the run-walk-run running for four minutes, and walking for a minute. The 4-1 ration is supposed to be used for a 8:30 mile, but for a 5k on fresh legs it produces more a 9:15 for me. After 10 miles it produced more of an 11:30 pace, but that was good enough for a finish of 2:29:10, 50 seconds under two and half hours. Yay!! I was ecstatic, I broke two and half hours and still felt great afterwards.