In cold and blustery January 2007, my wife and I ran our first half marathon – 13.1 miles/21.1 km – on a very cold -20 degrees Celsius day. We had never run farther than about 16 or 17km before, it was ridiculously cold for the entire 2 hours and 8 minutes that it took us to run that race. We were happy with the fact that we had finished the race at all.

Fast forward 4 months to May 27, 2007 and we were ready to run our second half marathon as part of Ottawa Race Weekend. We knew we felt better, but weren’t sure how much faster we’d be able to go – most of our other training runs that we’d done were not at a race pace, but at a long, slow, sustained pace. Our goal was to finish in less than 2 hours.

We had a great run – it felt good with very few “pains” or problems. We ran pretty much the whole race together, and crossed the finish line posting a time of 1:53:05. A 15 minute improvement is something we were both a bit surprised at, but extremely happy with.

I’m hoping that the next half marathon we do, we can get our times down to 1hr 45 mins – I’m not exactly sure how fast I can go, but I definitely want to find out…