The Old Runner

What a blessing to once again run a half marathon with my grandson, Ryan! This year, he's exactly half my age—36, and I'm 72! This was the first half marathon we've run together since 2016 when we ran the Knoxville Half Marathon for the fifth straight year. Ryan's a great athlete, having been an outstanding football and baseball player in high school and going on to play college baseball. He's still in great shape but limits his running to no more than 5 miles. That's probably not ideal training for running a half marathon, but I appreciate his willingness to humor his old grandpa.  This race replaces The Scream! Half Marathon, which was one of my all-time favorite races. In that race, we parked at the same place (Brown Mountain Beach Resort), took a bus to the top of the mountain, and then ran down the mountain, making it one of the fastest races around.  We started the race together, and he seemed happy to join me in my normal run/walk routine. The race is alm...

Well, that was interesting. In my zeal to run at least 20 half marathons this year, I found this one at the last minute and signed up. It was only about 100 miles away, so I could click off another half marathon with just a couple hours of driving.  I signed up right away, not bothering to read the race description. The next day (the day before the race), I found out it was a singletrack trail complete with plenty of roots, rocks, and obstacles that a roadrunner like myself is not used to running.  It was hot and muggy, with a dew point of 75, although being a warm-weather runner, I'd prefer that over 40 degrees any day. Before hitting the actual trail, the race began on a dirt road, and I could have stopped to walk but decided to try to keep running until I saw someone else walking. The green lines on the graph below represent walk breaks, so you can see that I didn't take a walk break until I was more than 2 miles into the race. By about 5 miles into the race, I was done. I ...

Touted as the "Hottest Half Here," the Run the South Half Marathon lived up to its billing this year. The temperature at the beginning of the race wasn't unbearable at 77 degrees, and even the humidity wasn't 100% (it was 88% according to the weather app). I think maybe the culprit was the dew point, although I don't know what it was. I do know that I was sticky and sweaty before the race and didn't even do a warmup.  I'm not sure I've explained how I use the Jeff Galloway Run Walk Run technique. I keep my watch set to alert me every 20 seconds, so I can run 20 seconds then walk 20 seconds, and that's how I do most of my training. In races, I run however many 20-second intervals I'm comfortable with and then just walk 20 seconds in between, so I may run three 20-second intervals (1 minute) or six 20-second intervals (2 minutes) then walk 20 seconds before running again. I just go by what feels right at the time, so if I'm going downhill I m...