Half Marathon Training - Part 1

In Early 2017 I was somehow talked into stepping up my running and tackling a greater distance than I had ever even considered previously.  At that point I had been running for a few years but had only recently converted to outdoor running from a treadmill.

At the time I had a few 5K events behind me but I was working up to my first official 10K event so quite why  thought that running 13.1 miles was something I could aspire to I will never really know, even though we are still a few months away from the registration of the event’s opening date I am committed nonetheless.  The event is in Malta and the flights and hotel are already booked so I went on line and found myself a training plan.

The training for my first half Marathon started on August 8th and the initial run just happened to fall while I was on holiday was in Portugal.  It started off fairly easily with a slow paced 5K run, hopefully this session will help me to acclimatise to running in the hot sun as I don’t really get much chance to do this in the UK.

I managed to get 3 runs completed in the hot Portuguese sun.  The first one was the steady 5K and I really enjoyed this run as I have had to drop the pace down during the Preconditioning phase.  This gave me the chance to run at the same pace as my wife so we completed the run together.  I really enjoyed having someone to run with so a couple of days later we did an off plan run together.  This was just a little 3K tootle though to keep the legs moving.

Run Number 3 was a 7k and the pace increased slightly so I was flying solo again after a short intro run together.  I actually ended up doing nearly 9K on this run.  The plan was to meet my wife at the end of the Marina but when I got there she wasn’t there so I did another lap of the Marina to check if she was OK.  When we finally met up it turned out that she had done the same thing.

The 4th run of the plan was the first actual run where I didn’t start off with my wife, this was a really tricky run as I had no idea how to manage my pace.  With the previous run I ran alongside my wife at first then slightly increased the speed, on this session I found I had started off too fast so dropping the pace proved to be tricky.

For our anniversary gifts this year we bought each other some new fitness trackers, I opted for the Garmin Forerunner 25 because this has the option for a virtual pacer but even with this set at my desired rate I still found it really hard to drop back after starting off.  I did manage to complete the distance and wasn’t too drastically over the desired rate.

The next few sessions introduced me to the world of Build ups.  The concept is quite simple.  Start off at a moderate pace then speed up and maintain that pace then take it up a little quicker to finish.  Initially I struggled.  I had set the magic watch at the lower pace and also changed my display so that I could track actual pace throughout the run and this did help but on my first build up run the first Kilometre was the fastest.  I soon got used to it after about the third session and I even managed to increase the distance and add in an extra increase in pace.


Everything was going so well that something had to go wrong.  This something came in the form of a chest infection and I was forced to rest and take antibiotics.  Luckily the tablets kicked in so I was only out of action for 6 days as on the Sunday I had entered a 10k event.
Right up to the morning of the even I wasn’t sure if taking part was a good idea so I decided to just take it easy and ended up dropping the pace and staying with my wife, who was also recovering from the same infection. This way we could look after each other.  I finished the run in 1hr 14 minutes, a far cry from my normal Sub hour 10K but I found it to be a really enjoyable run.

The following week saw another obstacle, another holiday.  The plan was to have a couple of good runs but the holiday turned out to be quite an active one as it was so we only managed one little 5K tootle around the bay. 
To Be Continued....