Running Goals

After doing the Mad City Marathon at the end of May, I had thought about training for another marathon this year, possibly the Chicago marathon in October. But then I decided that I didn't want to devote the necessary time to training, primarily because relocating to Sacto and getting settled here was taking lots of time and energy. And I also enjoyed taking advantage of some other offerings (Pilates, volleyball, swimming, water aerobics) at our gym. So instead I did the Sac 1/2 marathon in September, as I wrote about on this blog a couple of months ago.

After that event, I felt like I needed to set myself a new running goal. For a long time, I haven't really focused on speed, since I don't really see myself as a fast runner but rather as a consistent and middle-of-the-pack runner. But as I thought about my 5K times, I realized I'd be really happy to improve my pace to achieve a sub-25:00 time on a 5K (3.1 miles). So I've been pursuring that goal on the treadmill over the past couple of months, and last night I did my fastest time yet - 23:16 (this means sub-8:00 miles all the way!). I felt really good about hitting this mark, and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to replicate the experiment, at least to a certain extent, in an actual timed event sometime soon.

Kind of cool to reach these fitness goals, especially since I only discovered running and how great it can be during the past decade...

And next year for sure I'll train to do the California International Marathon at the beginning of December. After all, the finish line is literally 5 blocks from home in front of the State Capital, so how can I resist that?!