Race Strategy?

First off, training is going well, though on occasion still humbling. I had a tempo run on Tuesday that I ran with another girl (doing a tempo run) and a guy doing an 'easy 5k' which...yeah, kind of humbling. Still, the run did go well, if tiring. I'm not really looking forward to my run on Friday though - I have a 15k run with the last 10k at goal pace :( I keep having to tell myself it will be good long term. Another thing I'm not looking forward to? 30k on Sunday.


I have a race coming up in a couple of weeks - only a 5k which is kind of exciting. I'm not fabulous at 5k races so we'll see how it goes. I'm thinking I may just run this race balls out (that the technical term for it) and see what happens - I've never run a race where I'm completely spent at the end - mostly I try to pace for even splits or so, but sometimes when I'm done, I think I could have done better. So I may be employing the strategy of elementary school runners, which is basically to run as fast as possible (ok maybe not as fast as possible, but faster than I have been doing lately in races) as long as possible and hope that I make it to the end. It's only a 5k so what's the worst that can happen? There's no way I won't finish, it's short enough that I don't think that will be an issue barring some sort of injury, so I figure it's as good a strategy as any (if you can call it that).

Upcoming race.

I'm about a month out from the half marathon I'm doing this fall (wineglass half marathon), which is kind of exciting, as I only have a handful of long runs left until the taper. Yay for not having to be up at 6 am to start at 7 am for long runs on Sunday! Personally I think I'm more excited about being able to sleep in a little on Sundays again. To be fair, I'll probably only sleep in until 7:30 or 8:00 but still! I may actually get to have a life on Saturday nights! My family (minus my brother) is going to the race (3 of us doing the half, and 1 doing the full), so that will be neat. I'm hoping to run it with my sister, but we'll see. She primarily does triathlons now, and is super fit, but hasn't done any really long runs (as in >16 km) so I'm not sure how it will go for her. I'm hoping to be between 1h 50 min and 1h 45 min, which I think is doable. Well, the below 1h 50min is pretty doable, since my last one close to that, but we'll see how close we are to the low end to my goal.

One of the things I do have to get better over the next year, is to complete all my runs during the week. I tend to skip at least one of them, and I'm probably not helping myself by doing that. I guess it's something to work toward. I figure if I want to get faster, I do have to commit the time, even if it does eliminate some of my downtime. One of the things I do want to start up again is yoga - I did a lot of hot yoga in the winter, but got out of the habit when the weather got warmer. I suspect because who really wants to do hot yoga when it's already hot and humid outside? Anyway, the extra stretching during the week will help, I think, since I'm crap about stretching after training runs.