Getting Excited

I'm finally getting excited about running the Tucson Half Marathon on Sunday.  Earlier today I was thinking how strange it was that I wasn't obsessing about the race or nervous.  I listened to the podcast Running in the Center of the Universe today and Ashland Dave talked about a marathon he ran where he took for granted the distance and his training.  Since I know I can run 13.1 miles, I know I'm taking the distance for granted too but you know what?  13.1 is a long way!

I've been checking out my bloggie friends activities and realized I have to wash my running clothes.  I must wear my favorite running skirt on Sunday but it has to be washed first.  So while I'm doing laundry I started to pack.  I set aside new Asics socks to wear and my shoes and then realized I have to check the weather and then I thought I'd blog(yes, I get distracted easy).  So real quick....here's the weather for Sunday.

The showers prediction is gone and it looks like it is going to be an awesome race day.

We'll leave about noon tomorrow and go to the expo (I love to shop at expo's and need sunglasses) and get our race packets.  We are staying in the town close to the marathon start and the hotel is supposed to have transportation to both starts but the lady at the hotel also sounded unsure about the details.

Off I go to finish packing and doing laundry.  I'll stay focused this time.  :)

Ok, that lastest all of 5 minutes.  What pace should I run?  This is where I can get very geeky. I have a calculator specific for figuring paces/distances (Time Master II).  The other geeky thing I have is an estimating table called Running Trax.

The way Running Trax works is I look up a time/distance that I've run and see the points assigned. Then I go to the distance I'm going to run and see what it projects.  I ran a 22:00 5K back in September and the points assigned is 344.  I then go to the half marathon section and look up 344 and see it shows a 1:40.  Wow.  My PR is 1:47 so 1:40 seems very fast.  The next step is take my calculator and see that is a 7:38 pace.  Considering my 10K PR from a month ago was 7:32 pace, 7:38 really seems top fast. If I use Running Trax starting with my 10K pace, the estimate is 1:46:30 is 8:07 pace.  I want to try for an 8 min pace which puts me about 1:45.  That would be perfect and that will be my A Goal.  My B goal will be anything between that and 8:08 pace, which is my half marathon PR.