A few weeks ago, I started my first dedicated training cycle in nearly a couple years. I did “train” for Atlanta but I did not end up completing the plan I first wrote out for speed.

Even as I wrote out that initial plan, the first stepping stone towards a half marathon PR, I felt nervous; I felt nervous writing that previous sentence about the half marathon PR. I suppose that fear comes from wanting to avoid failure, which is funny because the only person tracking whether or not I meet this goal is me. We do serve as our harshest critics.

Whenever that nagging fear creeps in, I remind myself of my first tempo interval session on the track. You read that right. My first ever. I approached that workout nervous that I would not have the ability to hit the pace I needed and sustain that pace for the whole interval. Imagine my surprise when I had more difficulty holding back my pace than sustaining it. Talk about a confidence boost.

As I write this post, I have completed four of those tempo interval workouts, two with the tempos at half marathon pace and two with the tempo at 10k pace. I had to put in a little more effort for the 10k pace, obviously, but I managed to hit all of those intervals exactly at prescribed pace or just barely under. This dedicated training has fired me up for chasing goals again.

The first test came February 27, as Mom and I ran our first in person half marathon since November 2019 (I don’t count Hartness last November. That race was a hot mess.) While I have not reached the end of this training segment and did not full out race that half, I hope to gain insight into my current fitness through this race.

Overall, running feels better than it ever has since I started back to teaching in 2016. It’s about time that I set another PR.