So I am now 21 days away from the Dallas White Rock half which earlier this year I declared as my personal "Super Bowl" race. At the time I couldn't decide whether or not I would do a half or a full. I ended up registering for the half. I'll come back to that in a second.
Joining the Dallas Running Club was the best thing I could ever done. I think I've probably said that some 10 times already. I was so raw before and unorganized with my runs. I had somewhat of a weekly schedule but I wasn't varying the types of runs I did. By the time I had joined the DRC I had already built myself up during the grueling summer in North Texas, where nighttime temps were regularly in the mid to high 90's. By the time September came around I was able to whip out a 15-18 mile run without any problem, but I knew there was something lacking. I chose to join the half marathon training instead of the marathon and I think that was a good decision. It gave me a chance to catch up on learning.
When I ran the club's signature race, the DRC Half, it showed that this training clearly paid off (see previous blog). During our group recovery run, my pace leader who is full of bits of running info and other useless info broke the whole science down to me of training for marathons and half marathons. The full marathon group's longest training run is only 20 miles he told me. This made no sense to me since a marathon is 26.2 miles. Basically they run on a time basis during training, not distance. And you don't run at race pace during training. He explained further, that "It's not the distance that you are training for, it's training to stay on your feet for 4 hours. The speed and distance will be there if you train properly to stay on your feet and have a good race strategy on race day."
Remember when you were in Physics, Chemistry or maybe Calculus class and you were foggy on everything and one day everything just 'clicked'? Well everything clicked for me then.
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