This year marks the second half marathon that I have ever done. The last one was back in 2019 when I started running to exercise and lower my overall cholesterol level. I was nervous before the race because I didn’t train as seriously as I did the first. My fitness overall could have been better as previously too. The result, however, turned out to be better than expected. I got PR for this half marathon and beat the previous one by about 3 minutes. The result was probably because the race was conducted on a much flatter road than the last SF Half Marathon. This year is also exceptional because my wife decided to participate in the race with me. She had not run much before but agreed to sign up for the race. We also started training together. I also had a couple of my friends doing the race, and this was also their first. Everyone finished, and we had a good time. I’m looking forward to us doing races like this together soon. All of this ignited my interest in running again. We decided to sign up for next year’s Rock ‘n’ Roll San Jose Half Marathon, and I have set my goal of being able to finish it in under two hours. Hopefully, by this time next year, I’ll be able to do it. If you’re reading this, I hope you will root for me.
I started looking into using an AI Running App called TrainAsOne that can generate training plans for me. The initial thought is that it knows my easy pace quite well. But it created too many long-run sessions in a row that I felt there was little time to rest and recover. I had to reduce the number of running days to have more time to take a break. Nevertheless, it’s pretty good at developing different training sessions, so I will stick with it for a while.
My wife and I are visiting Vietnam end of this year, and we are also participating in a 10K race the day after landing. We are hoping that the jet lag will not affect us much. This will be my first running race in Vietnam. Vy had participated in one before. I’m looking forward to training for a few weeks there and seeing how the difference in weather and humidity would affect me. There is a park about a mile from where we will stay, which seems a good place for running. I bet we will have a good time.