It’s that time again! After finishing Week 20, I’m off to Taper Town until the Rock n Roll San Diego Half Marathon! I’ve pushed myself pretty hard these past two weeks and can really feel it. So much so that I knocked 2 miles off my planned run on Saturday and completely cancelled my gym workout on Sunday. Needless to say, I needed the rest and can’t wait for two weeks of lessening the intensity of my training.

Tuesday, I was back running over the 4 mile route I run before work. I was expecting this to be a week of slower mid-week runs. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. I’m really enjoying this 4 mile route. The first mile, the hardest one, I really felt stiff and slow. I was totally thinking that it would take me around 12 minutes to finish the mile. However, much to my surprise, I wasn’t that far off my first mile time from the Thursday before! Then, I followed that mile by running a faster 2nd mile than the Thursday before. I honestly don’t know how that happened. By the third mile and fourth mile, tiredness started setting in. I was able to battle through the tiredness pretty well on the third mile. However, the last half mile, I did slow a bit. I was so stoked that I finished in under 44 minutes! Considering that two days prior, I ran for 14 miles, I’ll take it!

Thursday’s run, I was very grateful to get in. After all, I took a big risk in taking Wednesday off. There was the threat of rain in the forecast for Thursday. So, Thursday’s run could have been done in the rain, thus my rain jacket. Fortunately, for me, the rain held off and I was able to cover the entire 4 miles. These were the hardest 4 miles yet. I really had to fight for each and every mile. I wanted to quit so many times. However, I found a way to motivate myself to finish all of them. As you can see, this was the slowest time I’ve had over these 4 miles and I’m okay with it. After all, I was still under 44 minutes. Usually,  in recovery weeks, my times will slow. Since I was expecting much slower times, I’m happy with how it all turned out!

For Saturday, the plan was to run 16 miles. The Rose Bowl had an event going on, so I couldn’t run there. I spent a little time of the week constructing a special route that would take me by some famous houses. It was fun to construct and fun to run. On top of that, as you can see by the elevation in the graph above, it came close to what I’ll encounter at the Rock n Roll San Diego Half Marathon Course…

I’m going to go into this a little more tomorrow as I cover this run in greater detail. For today, I’ll just mention a few of the highlights of the course I ran…

The first point I was running up to was the house they used as the Walsh Family home in Beverly Hills 90210! They filmed it in Altadena. Let’s just say that I really wanted to make it to the house. Getting there was crazy hard. The home is a little more than 5 miles from where I live and most of those miles were spent going uphill. The third and fourth mile were one continuous uphill climb with no flat areas at all. I’m not joking. At 3.75 miles I finally gave in and just walked it out. However, I was rewarded and recognized the house instantly.

Less than a block away from casa de la Walsh was the house of Dylan McKay.

Here was the view going down the hill I had climbed in the first miles. Parts of the hill were almost San Francisco steep. It was crazy. Y’all.

I also got to run by the Peach Pit from Beverly Hills 90210….

Don Draper’s house from Mad Men…

and the house from Father of the Bride. This house was right around the end of the 13th mile. By 13.5 miles, I was done for the day. That’s when my mind and body screamed too loud at me to ignore. So, I walked out the last half mile to make if 14. This run was a little slower than my previous weekend 14 mile run. Adding all that climbing took a lot out of me! Since you don’t technically need to run 16 miles while training for a half marathon, I decided in that last half mile that 14 miles two weeks in a row was enough.

As you can see, I was off a little from the previous week. However, that’s okay.

Time to bring on that taper! I’m pretty happy with where I am in getting ready for the Rock n Roll San Diego Half Marathon and 5K. It feels good to know I won’t have to run double digits until the half marathon day (May 31).  I think I’d feel better if I had finished all 16 miles or been faster over 14. For now, I’m just happy to say that I did what I did. This route was probably more difficult than the one I’ll encounter at the Rock n Roll San Diego Half Marathon. I’ll talk more about this run tomorrow.

Sunday became a much needed rest day. I was pretty wiped out and decided to listen to my body and give it a little extra rest. This coming week, I’m going to try to keep the 4 mile mid-week runs going. The first one will tell me a lot. I’ve got 6 miles to run next Saturday before heading off to Disneyland to check out all the 60th Anniversary fun! I can’t wait.