Training: Am I doing it and what for?

It's been a while since I posted anything about training for a race and if I had anything on the horizon. Between dealing with my back issue and not being able to run for over a month, my focus had turned to getting better rather than concentrating on my races coming up. So to answer the statement above, yes and yes. I am training and I have several things on the horizon.

Right now I am training for two half marathons with several smaller races mixed inbetween. Lets take a look at what I'm working towards.

My next race happens to be a 10K on June 15th. It's the Fall City Days Run, I will be running the 10K to try and get a new (and fast!) time for submittal to my half marathons for good corral placement. I have never run in Fall City before, however the website touts a flat and fast course, so hopefully that will be to my advantage! It will actually be my taper run before my next BIG race!

On June 22nd I will be running the Rock n' Roll Seattle Half Marathon.

I'm nervous, excited, anticipatory, worried. I signed up for this race a year ago after I had experienced it as a volunteer, see my post about volunteering at races. A friend of mine had trained for months to run this race and I was there to support her and other racers while I was waiting for her to finish. Since the day I signed up for this race, I signed up and ran my first half marathon at WDW in February.

So now I sit here and wonder, am I prepared for this race? Probably not as prepared as I would like to be. Taking a hiatus from running for over a month definitely effected my ability to train properly. So now I'm on a trunkated training plan that has me ramping up my mileage quite quickly, just so that I can complete the race upright, not for time. This isn't how I was wanting to run this race, feeling anxious and not prepared to run this race as efficiently as I had hoped.

My next race after RnR is the See Jane Run Seattle 5K on July 14th. I got this on a LivingSocial deal months ago and a friend of mine and I decided to run the 5K together. It should be fun. It's an easy course with lots of women and girls running together for a good cause. Then upon completing the race you get a little party with chocolate and champagne. YUM!

My next race isn't until August 24th, the Seattle Marathon 10K race. This race was on a coupon site for way cheap and with all the good reviews I'd heard about this race, I decided to do it. The location is different this year with the race route circling Lake Union. It will be a nice route as I have run this one several times before. Ironically though, this race and distance is a taper run the weekend before my BIG race weekend. (What is with me and having a race as a taper run before a big race?)

August 31st and September 1st will be my first ever back-to-back race. I am participating in the Disneyland Half Marathon weekend and running the Dumbo Double Dare. The DDD is when you run the 10K on Saturday and the half marathon on Sunday. You get the medals for those two races and an additional medal for completing both the races. Well I also decided to be a big shot and run the 5K as well. So in essence, I will be running the 5K, 10K and half marathon over the course of two days, that's 22.4 miles for all of you following along at home. Sheesh! I do know how to stack the deck against myself, huh?

So with all these races, I must be training, right?  Well I am using the Run Disney Training Guide that is 19 weeks long and encorporates back-to-back running days. I used the training schedule for my Princess Half Marathon and I did a pretty good job (not that my time was good, what can I say, I wanted pictures!). So I will be using this schedule during the few months until the race and adjusting it of course to coincide with training for my half in three weeks.

So that being said, you will be seeing lots of training updates and race recaps in the next few months. I'm really excited to be getting back into the swing of things and have goals to be training towards. I know that much about me, if I don't have a goal I get lazy. So I have everything in sight and my plan going already. I may not be at the peak of training that I wanted to be, but at least I'm out there making it happen.

Now it's your turn: Are you training for any big races? What training schedule do you use?