I originally signed up for the Ventura Marathon to join my nephew on his first 26.2 run. But after my nephew got injured and my lackluster training post-Bulldog 50k/25k I decided to drop down to do the half marathon.
To get ready for the half I hit the roads again but my muscles and breath asked “where’s the steep stuff and the nice power walk breaks?” Unfortunately that question came up again during my race.
Over the past year I’ve run over 800 miles and raced three half marathons, three challenging trail races over 11 miles long and in several 5ks. I also dedicated a lot of training time to increasing my climbing and logged over 24,000 feet in elevation gain. I trained on several mountain ranges in Southern California and feel like I can knock out a half marathon run at any time, so I did.
It’s been a couple of weeks since running the Santa To The Sea Half Marathon in Oxnard on Dec. 18. I was excited to tackle the course and try to set a PR for the half. The flat as a pancake course would be the perfect opportunity to run fast.
After tackling the XTERRA Point Mugu 18K Trail Race in October, I decided to do the Santa to the Sea Half Marathon in December next. But that left me with two months without races and I got impatient. I was looking through my timeline on the Strava site when I saw that tri-athlete Anthony Grey was in his last weeks of training for the Surfer’s Point Full Marathon. After that I signed up for the half marathon or the race to be held on Nov. 16, 2014.
The Ojai Half Marathon was my second half marathon, the first being the Santa To The Sea race in December. The Santa To The Sea was on a very flat course with an elevation loss but the Ojai race features a bounty of rolling hills.
I’m preparing for the Ojai Half Marathon on April 27 and it’s a hilly course so I’m setting up target mile splits for race day. When I ran my first half marathon this past December it was a very flat course and my main goal was just to finish while keeping an eye on my heart rate.
But once you set up your goal mile splits, you’re going to want to figure out your total time and that’s where I ran into a problem. I’m fairly proficient with Excel but I fumbled around for a good 20 minutes before I started Googling easier ways to accomplish the task without doing it manually.
The solution was Google Drive spreadsheets. To add up mile splits in a spreadsheet:
After 5 weeks of intense training, I ran in the Santa To The Sea Half Marathon race in Oxnard, California. When I found out that some friends were going to run the race I was very interested. I initially signed up for the 5K run but then chose to go for the half marathon.
After losing 40 pounds, controlling my diabetes and running/cycling in a sprint duathlon, all in a few months time period, I ran and finished my first half marathon this past Sunday.
