After the debacle of weather and feet at the Calgary Police Half, I asked Richelle for permission to run the Calgary Half (I'd like to point out that I asked her permission prior to bridging the subject with my husband....). Her response was encouraging: "Absolutely."
I decided to run it as a training LDS, especially since the weekend prior I was at the CSR training camp in Penticton (awesome camp, great mileage, it's enough material to demand an entire blog post, check back here later in the week!). My goal was to run the course and reach the finish line happy with an honest effort. Because there wasn't a lot of pressure, I was very zen about the race all week during taper, and even at the pre-race package pick-up, Richelle commented that this was a very different type of approach for me, and that I seemed very calm.
Race day dawned sunny and wonderful. I met up with TTL people at the C-train station, we hung out together, laughed a bit, warmed up together, waited for the starting gun. And..... we're off!
I really liked the course, as it covered very familiar territory, I knew the distances between landmarks and could estimate how much longer to refueling or walk breaks or whatever. About 13 or 14km into the run, I checked my watch and thought, hey, I'm feeling pretty good here, let's see what happens if I turn up the intensity??? Okay, this feels good! At 17km I turned it up again! As it happens, I turned it up enough for a PB!! Yep, on a day that was supposed to be a solid training run, I PB'd by almost a full minute. Cool.
Now, I know that I run with a fast crowd (ha ha, pun intended), so it took a while to get excited about setting a PB, 'cause most people that I train with run the half-mary in the 1:45 to 1:55 range, so it's a bit embarrassing to admit to PB'ing with 2:11:28. However, now that a few days have passed, I'm actually very proud and excited to OWN that 2:11:28 PB, cause it was the result of a season of hard work, it came to me unexpected and unaware, and hell, a PB is a PB!
And now, back to IMC training.....
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