Half Marathon Goal Pace

I had a fantastic track workout this morning and it occurred to me that I needed to figure out my half marathon goal pace before tomorrow's tempo workout.  (In the Hanson plans, your tempo run pace is the same as your goal race pace.)

ARGH.

I suck at picking goal paces.

I think I did a good job picking my goal pace of 7:15 for marathon training, but that was a chart reading error.  I was aiming for a 3:15 marathon.  7:15 per mile is equivalent to a 3:10 marathon and I ran a 3:11:09.

The last half-marathon I ran was in November 2016 and I set a PR of 1:29:22.  This was a large PR for me at the time (4:09).  I used Kara Goucher's half marathon training plan for Oiselle and had a goal pace of 7:00 mile (1:31 finish).  1:29:22 is a 6:49 pace average.  I haven't analyzed my training extensively for that race, BUT my highest mileage week for that training was 35 miles.  I will hit that in week 2 (of 18) for this half marathon.

My half-marathon is October 15 and is the same course (unless they change it) as last November's race.

I would like to believe that I will see a significant time drop in my half time if all goes well with the Hanson plan this time around.  I put in my 5K time (from March) into a race equivalency calculator and came up with a half-marathon goal pace of 6:44.  This is 5 seconds per mile faster than last fall, and would translate to a 1:28:16 finish.

Hmm.

I think I'm selling myself short with a 6:44 / 1:28:16.  It doesn't excite me. (I do realize at some point I will not have huge PR gains!)

Hanson race equivalency to my 5K PR of 18:53 is a 1:26:52 or 6:38 pace.  My 5K PR was set in May of 2016, which is over a year ago.  However, this morning my fastest 400 (of 12) was at 5:20 avg pace and my slowest was 5:40 average pace and the majority in 5:30. And I felt AMAZING during this workout.

A 5:30 mile pace 5K is a 17:05.  I'm not saying that I could run a 17:05 5K, but I feel like I have gotten a major fitness boost from last year.  (And....after this morning, I really want to run a 5K!) This is all to say that I don't think that a 6:38 half marathon pace is that crazy.

If we want to get into crazy land, I would have to run 6:29 to break 1:25.

So that was fun.  I think I will start with a 6:44 as my goal pace and see how that feels.