2014 Race Calendar

With almost 4 months of solid running under my belt since Lucy was born, I've spent the last few weeks thinking about what races I'm going to train for (and spend money on) this year.  I feel confident that I can PR in several distances this year and look forward to pushing myself both mentally and physically.  It's hard to believe that it's been about a year and a half since I trained hard but I think taking the year off from running hard (although I didn't really have a choice since I was pregnant) has kept me from feeling burnt out and has made me eager to race.

Like I've mentioned before, I've been running strictly on the treadmill since Lucy was born except for 3 runs.  It's not my ideal scenario but with the extremely cold weather and having to run at 5:00 AM, it's my only option right now.  We did get a BOB Revolution jogging stroller for Christmas and I cannot wait to try it out once it warms up outside.  I plan on using it when I run on my one day off of work and on the weekends so Todd & I can run together again, something we were just talking about that we missed this past weekend.

So what does my race calendar look like so far?

I plan on starting to train hard at the beginning/middle of March and my first race will be the Cleveland 10 Miler on April 26 with Emily.  I plan on running this race for fun since the following week I'll be running a half marathon.

I'm hoping to PR at the Cap City Half Marathon on May 3 or at the very least, break 1:40.  It's been a few years since I've run this race and I know the course has changed a bit but it's usually a great race and event.

After the half in May, I'm going to ease off the longer runs for a month or so and run the Jack Roth 5K on June 8.  I would LOVE to finally break 20:00 min in a 5K so that is my goal.  I've never run this 5K but Todd did a few times several years ago.  My other motivation for running this race is I recently read on their Facebook page that the winners will be outfitted in a new lululemon outfit.  If that isn't motivation, I don't know what is!  Oh, and an added bonus is the race shirt is a Homage shirt!

And the big race of the year will be the Columbus Marathon on October 19.  This will be my 5th Columbus Marathon and 8th total marathon.  It'll be interesting to see if I can PR at this distance after having a baby and with less time on my hands.  Training for a marathon can be time consuming and training to PR on top of that will be even harder to fit into my schedule so I'm not quite sure what my goal is for this race yet but I have plenty of time to figure that out.

So those are the 4 races I definitely plan on running this year, as long as I remain injury-free, and I might add another 5K or two in the mix this summer as well.