the leather hunt

I decided to take it easy this week, it being the week after three weeks of hard, sustained running. The week consisted of the mandatory long run on Sunday, the only difference being I had to do it indoors on the treadmill and did a distance of 10 kms...so it was a long ‘short’ run! I was happy with the effort though; I clocked 61 minutes 20 seconds in covering the 10 k and had touched the 5 k at 27:37. Now that the adhm is just around the corner, the idea is to cover long distances at my targeted race pace. The difficult part is always regarding the kind of goals that you should set for yourself; there is always this pitfall of setting yourself a superhuman target just because you’ve trained your heart out! This being my first half marathon (and my first competitive race for that matter) am setting my sights on a sub two hour finish, which I know will be no cakewalk. For starters, my pace will have to be a notch above 10 kms for almost two hours at a stretch, I have no idea how my body would react to that kind of oxygen debt. The other option is to perhaps really push myself at 12/13 kms for nearly an hour, take a 5 minute breather and then finish off at just above 10 k/hour. Either way, its not an easy choice to make, which just gets compounded by the fact that there is no way to know your exact pace while running outdoors, atleast newbies will never be as good as seasoned runners whose instincts are way better. Truly this is the leather hunt!