the trick is to keep breathing

So I ran the Pittsburgh Half Marathon on Sunday!

Before I went into the race, I had decided that my goal times were 2:20 (low end) and 2:10 (high end) - I would have been perfectly happy with the low-end time, about a 10:40 mile, and the high-end goal (a 10:00 mile) was for if I felt really good going into the race.

Well, I'm not really sure I felt all that good, but I pushed really, really hard, and I pretty much made my high-end goal time for myself. 13.1 miles in 2:10:56 was my official finishing time.

yes, I am still a little weird sharing my real name online (even though like 75% of you probably know it anyway)


[HM] Pittsburgh Half Marathon by seventhe on Garmin Connect

( All the nerdy facts, stories, reports, and graphs! )
I haven't taken a week off of running since January 1st.

I am really proud of jennyclarinet and I -- we talked about doing this while dressed in togas and drinking Four Loko!, and look what it turned into. Without Jenny I probably wouldn't have been able to stick with this, but knowing that Jenny was training hard and that we were going to do this together (even though we didn't run together) made me stick to my training plan during the hardest semester I've ever had, when it would have been really easy to quit. I had Denis training too, and I knew Jim would be playing, so there was a lot motivating me to keep up the work. It certainly wasn't easy, but hey, if I can work a full-time job that makes me endure 11-hour days and hold a full-time graduate semester workload and train for a half marathon...

And that's the story of how I ran 13.1 miles. My legs hate me now. The end!

Last night I ran 4.5 miles. Without stopping. That's 45 min of straight running. At ~6.0mph. That's a personal record for distance.

And I did it instead of going out to the bar.

Days like this I confuse myself.

Anyway, \o/ ! Go me.

The rest of this post is attn: jennyclarinet, hilldo, and I guess any other runners:

1) I saw a bunch of shirtless Cavs players on the news this morning and thought of you. (For others: Jenny and I spent a good amount of time once at a J-Squad party googling "Wally Szczerbiak shirtless" and "LeBron James penis".)

2) The Akron Marathon. Saturday, September 26th. There are a few options we could do: marathon (hell no), half marathon (also probably a hell no), or a Team Relay, which sounds the most interesting to me.

The Team Relay needs 5 runners. Each runner runs a small section of the marathon, and then passes off a snap bracelet to the next runner. Each section is a different length, so you can have people of all different levels running together:

First	3.5 mi
Second	5.7 mi
Third	6.3 mi
Fourth	3.1 mi
Fifth	7.6 mi

We'd have until September, so whoever decided to pick up the longer legs of the run would have plenty of time to train. Plus, with me, Jeff, James, and Jenny running, we will need one more person... September is plenty of time to train for the shortest leg, that being 3.1mi. The Couch-To-5K program would do that in plenty of time. (That is, unless we get Melissa to run that long leg for us; then we're golden. Haha.)

Now for the bad news. First of all, we'd have to be there at 7am on a Saturday. Blech. Second, registration is $36 per person. Now, most 5Ks cost money to register; it looks like $20-$40 online depending on the race. But still, that's money we'd have to pay for the race. Akron Marathon is a non-profit organization, and their charity benefits "local fitness" from what I can tell; not a bad thing, but I'd hoped to pick a race that targeted a more specific charity. (Of course, Jeff's response is "Look up the course and we can run it together for free on our own day." Umm...kind of defeats the point.)

The other bad thing is that we'd all be running separately, instead of being able to run together and pace each other. However, the plus side of that is that we could say the J-Squad ran a marathon. XD

We have until August to register, so there's plenty of time to think about it... what do you guys think?