running in the rain

So, on this morning's run, I realized that it may have only been coincidence that each of the last three times that I went running on a rainy day it cleared up completely for me run. Because today, it decided to start pouring about halfway in to my 2.5 miles.

Let me tell you, though, if running at 7:15 am isn't enough to make you feel hardcore, running at 7:15am in the pouring rain certainly is!

I decided to start a half-marathon training schedule for beginners. The problem is that most of them are 12 weeks long. I have 18.5 weeks left til my half. (Thank goodness it isn't the other way around!) So, I've decided I'm going to do a few weeks on one training schedule and then switch over to a slightly more intense one that includes some speed work and hill work and then just do an extra week or two of the middle weeks of that. I need to finish the schedule on schedule so that I can correctly taper for the half-marathon.

This is the training schedule I'm going to start with: http://running.about.com/od/racetraining/a/basichalf.htm

Today was a 2.5 mile day (first thursday of the schedule). I did my long run this week on Tuesday, but I'm going to switch over to the Saturday long run schedule that this program has. (Most have them on Sat or Sun because they figure most people have time those days to run for longer.) I'm a bit ahead of this schedule in terms of how long my long run was this week, but not in terms of overall weekly mileage. So I'm going to go with this schedule more or less (maybe add .5 miles to the first two Saturdays; we'll see) for a few weeks.

These were today's mile breakdowns--pace and heart rate:
11:40 136bpm
11:37 151bpm
11:06 (per mile pace for the last half mile) 162 bpm.

Obviously I started slower than I finished today. This was in part because my legs needed to loosen up from Tuesday's 5 miles!