Josh Writes a Blog

Tag: fitness

  • Holiday Half Pre-Race Analysis

    Well, we’ve made it. Tomorrow, December 10th, I will be running my last official race: the Holiday Half. This will cap my 2023, which began well, went well, and then ended shittily. Is this the default for my life? Perhaps, but them’s the breaks.

    I’ll be honest: I really don’t want to run this. My patience with this year had quickly run out, and the forecast for the 10th is rainy. And not just a light drizzle, it’s supposed to rain pretty flagrantly for the two+ hours I’ll be out there plodding along. What’s worse, the forecast for the days after are sunny. This is following days upon days of rain in Portland.

    But I’m going to do it because I paid for it, goddammit. I paid a lot of money to run this half marathon and I’ll do it even if I walk most of it.

    My training plan has been abandoned and I guess I’m “playing it by ear,” or really “running it by feet.” Here are my goals:

    G Goal: 2:12:25 / 10:06/mi
    A Goal: 2:15:00 / 10:18/mi
    B Goal: 2:20:00 / 10:41/mi
    C Goal: Just do the damn thing.
    *G Goal is my Garmin Goal, aka the time Garmin predicts I can do.

    These are all within my ability, I believe. 10:06 I know I can maintain for a few miles at least. Maybe even 13! I suspect my Garmin Coach training helped bolster my pace a bit. My stomach has been weird lately due to stress and poor eating because I’m broke because of my car getting broken into. Lots of stuff happening recently which has soured my overall life experience.

    So, no real pace plan other than to try and keep a good one. I’m going to try, try, try my damnedest to start slow, but we all know how these things go. I’d love a negative split but I don’t know if my body is capable of it yet.

    For fuel I have Clif bars and Powerade. Breakfast of champions. Honestly not sure if they will be adequate or not. They certainly didn’t feel adequate on my 10 mile run, but they settled a lot better than gels.

    I appreciate that I’ve been at this long enough that I’m approaching a second half marathon with a bit of a blase attitude. It’s still so surprising that it’s December already. I’ve tipped over the 1,200 mile club for ORRC, and am well on course to hit 800 miles running for the year. Overall, huge success. Learned a lot about myself, about my ability to persevere even when I don’t wanna.

    I’ll have a race report tomorrow. My last one of 2023. Until then.

  • Running Recap: November

    Running Recap: November

    Since I am running a straight blog.joshbelville.com/ site now, I backed up my old site but forgot to make a proper .xml export of my WordPress posts there. So I have them … in strange, obscure SQL format that I don't want to spent time trying to extract.

    That means I’ve got a couple of race reports that are lost, so I figured I’d just do a recap of the month in general.

    Mileage

    Running: 100.31 miles
    Walking: 25.40 miles

    Happy to surpass the 100 mile mark. I don’t know if I’ll be doing that again anytime soon, to be honest, unless the Holiday Half pushes me over the line. I’m also fine with fewer walking miles. I really only got to 25 because I was logging every time I went to the store.

    Turkey Trots

    I only ran two races in November, and both were turkey trots. The first was a rematch at Portland International Raceway with the Hood to Coast 5k there. That was at night and was very cold. It felt colder than last year.

    My chip time was 32:33 but that was for 3.34 miles, which the course absolutely is, because I double checked on Google maps. Regardless I really felt good on this run and was going at a nice clip for the first two miles.

    The second one was the next morning and was the ORRC Turkey Trot. This was a four mile run at the Oregon Zoo. It started rather abruptly, which was very fun, and the first half was very downhill, with the second half running up that hill (cue Kate Bush here). It was tough, especially after running fast the night before. But we did get to see some mountain goats chilling out at the entrance. My time was 50:31 but it was a fun run and I was dying going back up the hills.

    parkruns

    Three parkruns this month, #s 31-33. Nothing spectacular about any of them, really. I was running them slowly due to my Garmin Coach half marathon training. 11/18 was college themed for gameday or something like that, I don’t know, but I repped Boise State because A) I had some BSU clothing and B) I don’t have any Portland State gear.

    Garmin Coach

    Lastly, I signed up for a half marathon training plan through Garmin Coach, using Coach Amy. This was more or less a bad idea. It wasn’t terrible, but she did bump my “easy” pace to a 10:55/mi average, making all of my runs a little more difficult and basically preventing any of them from falling into my actual Zone 2 easy run heart rate. I’ve since stopped the training plan, but that happened in December so I technically can’t talk about it on this post.

    That was it for November! The only race I have in December is the Holiday Half, which I will of course recap here in ye olde blog. Until then!