A good friend of mine signed us up for the half-marathon in Frankfurt in March. We ran the half-marathon in Hamburg in June last year (2023) and it was fun. But I knew I would stop the training as soon as I hadn't scheduled an official race. And you know what? That is exactly what happened after the half-marathon in Hamburg. But this time, even after we signed up, I wasn't motivated to start my training again. I ran once (in October) between the half-marathon in June and the end of December. For a moment, I thought "So what? I will just pay the starting fee but cancel the race". Fortunately, I came to my senses and started training after all. That's not how I want to start in the new year.

But why a "Training Journal"?

It's all part of a big plan. It's all about putting a little pressure on myself by sharing my goal and my training publicly. I hope that sharing my (rather short) journey publicly will help me to stay motivated because there were less than 3 months left until the half-marathon when I decided to finally start my training.

Welcome to the first entry of my half-marathon training journal

Let's have a quick look at my first training activities. The first one was on December 28th:

It was just 4.5k, but with a little less than 6min/km, I'm absolutely fine with the result. Later that day my family and I went to a big outlet center where I decided that it was time to grab new running shoes. My old ones were a little more than 5 years old and have seen better days for sure. And you know how it is with new things, I had to try them the next day. But this time, I messed up the tracking due to this annoying new "Splits" feature of my Apple Watch. And due to that mess-up, I also lost a little more than one kilometer between the two activities. That's why the titles of the tracked activities are "Too Stupid for my Apple Watch Part 1" and "Too Stupid for my Apple Watch Part 2".

All in all the run was fine again. A good start just before the new year.

But then came January 1st. Don't ask me why I thought it would be a good idea to run the day after New Year's Eve. It was not. My legs were killing me from the beginning. I stopped running after 3.7k and walked home.

Fortunately, I've been back on track since Wednesday (January 3rd). I ran my standard lap of 6.6k on Wednesday and today and both runs felt fine.

My goals for the next week

There are two main goals for the next few weeks.

1 - Run every other day (or at least 3 times a week)

It's much easier for me to get up for a run if I do it regularly. And given that have less than 2.5 months to be able to run 21k, running every other day might be a good plan. Of course, sometimes this won't work out for whatever reason, but if I run 3 times a week, I would still call that "consistent".

2 - Run 10k in a single run by the end of January

Again: The timeline is relatively short, so I think I should be able to run 10k by the end of January. And since I can already run the 6.6k without being completely out of breath afterward, that should be a realistic goal.

See you in my next "Training Journal"

Or maybe not. I'm kind of famous for starting a series of blog posts and then abandoning it completely... 🙈

Training Journal: Week 1