Report on my awesome sub 80 min half marathon

The more I run the less I like the construct “sub-something”. My running routine has no goals attached to it. Running has become my life’s cornerstone habit, my passion. It can’t be defined by some tactical goal or past result. My results are the outcome — checkpoints — of my consistent training. I don’t train towards goals. Well, I have some targets — like a 2.49 marathon in Chicago later this year — but my mindset is all about my weekly routine, not about some future result.

That said, some milestones are nice to achieve, like running a marathon under 3 hours which I did four months ago (2.57). And it’s good to race a couple of times a year to see what you’re capable of.

The half marathon was in Huntington Beach (“Surf City”), California.

I signed up somewhat spontaneously, a week before the race. When you get more intimate with running and learn from other runners, you understand that to achieve a certain marathon result, you should be able to have a certain 5K time, 10K, 10 miles, a half-marathon, and so on. There are ranges of course and these are not scientific extrapolations. But the connection between different distances is pretty solid. I signed up to get a reference point for how fast I can run a half-marathon. I didn’t want to be some special event. I didn’t even taper, save for a slightly reduced couple of runs two days before the race.

I was nervous before the race, more so than before my sub-three-hour marathon effort in October of 2021. Then…