¡Hola a todos!
As you might gather from the greeting, I'm now in Spain for the week. Not a bad place to be in the first week of the taper period leading up to the Reading Half Marathon. Unfortunately, it's not all fun and games as I'm here on business, plus the fact that I've fallen sick right after my hardest training period. At this stage it's best that I stop running and try to recover as quickly as possible, before I start to do any running this week. Hopefully this won't put me off the roads for long! Here's a picture of Castell de Bellver in Palma, which is where I did quite a lot of my running when I was in Spain before.
I had a look at the timer on my blog, and noted that there are 200 days left until the Berlin Marathon, which is the marathon I'm focusing on to break three hours in. It does sound like a lot of time, but if you factor in the off-days, e.g. taper days, easy days, missed training days and sick days (like now!), then these things can eat a huge chunk of time out of your available training days. In an earlier blog post I mentioned that I had 259 days left, so up to now, over 8 weeks (a fifth of my training period) have passed. I always provide training recaps every week, but it's also good to recap over several weeks as I'm interested to know how much I have progressed since then.
Of course, the only real way to know that I have made improvements is by racing (assuming nothing goes wrong during the race), so by peaking for the Reading Half Marathon I'll have a general indication of how well I'd perform in a marathon. According to the McMillan Running Calculator a 1:30:00 half marathon time would equate to roughly a sub 3:10:00 marathon time. It's not sub 3-hours, but it's a step in the right direction. The calculator isn't going to be accurate for everyone's performance, but for me it seems to be giving close enough times.
Looking at the training schedules, I'd say that I'm running as hard, if not harder, than I was when I did Berlin last year. At this stage, I've already put in more miles in training than last year's preparation for the Reading Half Marathon. I'm feeling confident that I can set a new PB in the half marathon, but I won't dare to be bold in saying that I'd go under 1:30:00 on race day. But let's hope that I do, so that it gives me the reassurance that I'm heading in the right direction, and that I can finally update my personal bests section on this blog!
Hasta pronto (see you soon in Spanish),
Aaron
