Motive Half-Marathon Course

Needless to say, with all of the wedding activities, UT Longhorn games, and craziness at work, my training has been suffering. I did manage to run 18 miles the week of the wedding, but have only run 8 miles in the past 2 weeks prior to Saturday. My Team in Training group has a regularly scheduled long run on Saturday mornings, but I have missed the last three. The last long run I did was 8.2 miles so when I found out this week's run was the whole Motive Half-Marathon course of 13.1 miles, I was more than a little initimidated and anxious. Not only that, we had a "reorganization" at work on Friday so I went to happy hour Friday evening with my new boss and had 6 beers since he was buying. I don't think that's quite the kind of carb loading I should be doing, but the run went surprisingly well. I did the whole run it about 2:24 minutes which included a 7 minute bathroom stop and a couple of water/gatorade stops.

My primary goal was to finish the distance with a secondary goal of running the entire distance without any walking. I accomplished both! It's is really amazing what your body can do if you put your mind to it. Of course, I also remembered why I was out running on Saturday morning, to raise money and awareness for the Leukemia and Lymphoma society. I recently received an email saying that our honored hero is now an honored angel, a 6 year-old boy lost his battle with cancer. I feel very fortunate that I am physically able to run and run simply because I can.

This was the run that I really needed to complete to reinvigorate my training, and to give me back my self-confidence. I have already completed the course, so the Motive Half-Marathon in 3 weeks should be fairly easy. My goal now is to establish a Personal Record. Did I mention that the weather was a perfect 58 degrees? There is one mean hill on the course that increases over 250 ft over a distance of one mile. See my heart rate graph below; the red area is the altitude:


Heart Rate, Speed, Distance, and Altitude Graph

As you can see, I need to calibrate my Polar s625x as it only shows 12.8 miles instead of 13.1.