Chilly Half Race Plan

The Newton Chilly Half is just 5 days away.  It will be my seventh half marathon, and the first that I've really trained for.  You see, three of those half marathons were part of half ironmans.  Totally different game.  My first half, back in Australia was just after I had moved to Brisbane, I used it as an excuse to keep myself training, but I think I only did one ten mile run in preparation.  Then two BAA Half Marathons, each on the tail ends of tri seasons where I was taking some time off from training, but not racing.  The danger of half marathons is that they are just short enough that I feel like I can just go out and run it without training.

Not so this time.  That is not the Coach Alan way.  I've been training for 9 weeks with increasing distance each week, starting around 7 miles, topping out around 11.

Race starts at 7:30, it's gonna be about 35 degrees then with winds around 10 mph.  I'm planning on wearing the same gear as the Devils Chase.  Brief warmup.  I'm gonna be racing at a 7:45 pace (hopefully with my virtual partner on my Garmin if I can get everything working right) with heartrate varying with the HILLS. 

That's right, this course has several of the hills from the Boston Marathon itself.  So, yeah there's that.

My current Half Marathon PR is 1:46.  I'm feeling pretty confident I can beat that.  If I hold my 7:45s, I'll come in at 1:42.

Finally, the most important part of the half marathon:  the BPC Brunch.  No training can prepare me for that.  See you on the course.