The Flower City Half Marathon here in Rochester is twelve weeks away.  I haven’t officially signed up for this race yet – but I unofficially signed up in my head yesterday, and that totally counts.

A Spring Kick in Your Pants

Having a race on the calendar can be a great way to stay motivated to get out and run – it works if you’re looking to get started running too. If learning to run or getting back into running is on your To-Do list for 2013, this is a great time to find a spring race to start training for. From that video on The Science of Productivity, having a real deadline can be very powerful when it comes to getting things accomplished!  12 weeks from now puts us at the end of April.  If you’re a newbie runner, you could be 5K ready in 8 weeks!  If you’ve already run a 5K and are looking to increase your distance, you could be 10K ready in 8 weeks too.  Even if the race you have in mind isn’t until April or May, it’s still not too early to get out there and start moving.

Find a Race

If you don’t know where to start, google “race calendar <your city and state>”, Active.com is a good place to find a local race too.

Once you’ve got a race in mind, take a look at some training plans.  There are tons of training programs available on the internet for any distance you can imagine – I like Hal Higdon, but Jeff Galloway is another well known, trusted running coach with a bunch of training plans too.  The “Galloway Method” includes planned walk breaks, which is how I survived the Steamtown Marathon in 2011.  There is no shame in walk breaks if that’s what it takes to get your butt across the finish line!

I’m going to loosely follow Hal Higdon’s 12 week Intermediate Half Marathon training plan for my race.   I ran 6 miles this weekend as my test to see if I really want to do this race or not.  I felt good, and so I unofficially signed up for the race in my mind yesterday.  I’ll sign up for real when it gets closer, but before registration price increase on March 31.  (Nothing like a deadline to get things done!)

Get Ready to Run

One of the my favorite ways to get psyched for a longer-than-usual run is to put together a new playlist.  I sat down on Saturday night and dug through my music collection to find out some old favorites.  Ghetto Superstar, anyone?  I think Lose Yourself by Eminem is one of my all time favorite motivational running songs.  I also added Mr. Saxobeat, purchased by request thanks to our new Just Dance YouTube habit.  Not only is this song is fun to dance to, but it’s a great running song too!  I had to resist the urge to bust out my fancy pants dance moves while running down the sidewalk yesterday, it’s possible a couple of hip swivels escaped mid-stride.

Then Get Ready to Eat

Yesterday’s post-run lunch was homemade chicken soup in bone broth – something I’ve been making once a week or so with joint and cartilage health in mind a la Deep Nutrition.

Homemade chicken soup is better than any chicken noodle gloop that has EVER come out of a can, I can hardly believe it.   Bone broth is good for you?  And it’s delicious too?  Sign me up!  Protecting our joints and cartilage feels especially relevant right now if you’ll be increasing your mileage or getting ready to start hitting the pavement soon.

(I’ll share how I’ve been making bone broth in my next post – it’s insanely good and not very hard to make either.)

For the next 12 weeks, I plan to blab about all things running and training on Monday’s.  Do you have a spring race on your calendar?  Is there a training plan you like to use?  Got any all time favorite running songs?  Do tell!