Ep #31: How to Pick the Best Half Marathon for You

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who is midlife and plus sized and you want to start running but don’t know how, or if it’s even possible, you’re in the right place. Using proven strategies and real-life experience, certified running and life coach Jill Angie shares how you can learn to run in the body you have right now.

Hey rebels, you are listening to episode number 31 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today we’re talking about half marathons again. Specifically, how to choose a race and a training plan so you end up with a fun and fulfilling experience. I’m also going to share with you a conversation that I had interviewing someone for the Rebel Runner Unleash program, and why it’s such an important conversation for you to have with yourself. And then finally, my latest obsession this week is a total change of pace and of course, completely and totally amazeballs.

So whether you’re a brand-new runner, an experienced pro, or maybe even just thinking about it because all your insane friends are doing it, you’re in the right place.

Okay, so you all know that I’ve been taking applications and doing interview for the Rebel Runner Unleash program. This is the coaching group that I’ve created where I’m training 10 women together for the New Orleans Rock n Roll half, and I’ll tell you, it’s going to be pretty epic. Anyway, I was on the phone this week with a really amazing woman, and we were discussing how she’d been a runner and a triathlete a few years ago but hadn’t really done much recently and had gained some weight in the process.

And every time she tried to get started again, her inner mean girl would get busy telling her what a failure she was because she was no longer as fit as she was before, and she really missed the person that she used to be but was really struggling to figure out a way to get back to her.

So before we got into talking all about the training program for the New Orleans race, I told her one thing. This is what you need to do before you do anything else, and that is stop being an asshole to yourself. And I really meant that from the deepest part of my heart for real. Like, if it had been a friend of hers in that same situation, she wouldn’t have been saying those things to that friend, right? She wouldn’t have spent hours telling her friend what a failure she was or how come you’re not the person that you used to be, right?

That’s a really mean thing to do and when we love someone, we don’t say those things. We don’t even think them. We want the best for our friends and family and so we do whatever we need to do to help them get what they want. But somehow it seems really hard to do that for ourselves, and I think it’s partly because we have this belief that if we focus on what we lost, that will motivate us to get it back, right? That if we spend all our time thinking like, you need to get this back, you’ve fallen so far, that that’s actually somehow motivational.

And here’s the deal: if that worked, people around the world would be running triathlons, doing triathlons, they would be skinny, they would have all the money in the world, nobody would ever get addicted to drugs or alcohol, right? So if focusing on what we’ve lost was actually a valid motivational tool, it would work. Nobody would have to hire a coach because we would just figure out how to do it ourselves by beating the shit out of ourselves.

And I mean, I think a lot of people think that negative motivation is effective. Like, think back to when you’re in high school and the soccer coach would shame the slowest kid on the team, right? And sure, in the moment she might speed up, or she might not, but inside she’s crying her eyes out, she hates every minute of it and she probably quits the team eventually, right? Because negative motivation doesn’t work.

It may work in the short term, and the very short term is what I’m talking about, but it just – it hurts, it feels terrible and it doesn’t create lasting results. And most of the time, what it really does is it keeps us stuck in a loop. So we shame ourselves, we take a few half-hearted actions, maybe we get up and we go for one run, we don’t get the results we want immediately and we quit. And then that gives us more evidence for how much we suck and the shaming starts all over again.

It’s this really horrible cycle that we get in. And I know you can relate to this. I know if you’re human, you can relate to this. I know because I’ve talked to so many of you in the Facebook group that really struggle with this. So I know you can relate to it, I know you’ve done it to yourself, and then you wonder, “Hmm, why can’t I seem to get motivated? I’m beating myself up on the regular and it doesn’t seem to be working.”

And again, it’s because negative motivation doesn’t work. Shaming doesn’t work. Comparing your current body to the smaller fitter one that you used to have does not work. You know what works? Forgiving yourself for the past and deciding on purpose how you want to be in the future. And I know you’re sitting there thinking, “Yeah, it sounds really easy, Jill, but I can’t just stop thinking those shitty thoughts about myself, I’m really good at it.”

And here’s what we’re going to talk about right now: I know I’ve told you this before a million times, but here’s the deal. Our thoughts create our feelings, and our feelings drive our actions. So if you are constantly thinking that you are a failure, you are going to feel defeated all the time, or some version of that emotion. You’re going to feel an emotion like frustration, feeling defeated, feeling angry, pissed off, whatever it is. And when you feel that way, you’re actually not going to get your ass out of bed in the morning and go for a run. That’s how it works.

Think you’re a failure, you feel defeated, you sleep in. When we feel defeated, we don’t jump out of bed with a smile on your face saying I can’t wait to go for my run today. We say fuck that shit, I’m hitting the snooze button.

So most people think about 50,000 thoughts a day. And this is according to Google, and at least – I mean, for the average person, about 70% of them are negative thoughts. So that’s like, in any 24-hour period, and if you sleep eight hours a day, so in any 16-hour period, your brain is flooded with about 35,000 negative thoughts if you’re kind of an average person.

Now, if you are – I guarantee, most of those thoughts, right now if you’re stuck figuring out how to get yourself back to the person you used to be, all of those 35,000 thoughts or a fair number of them are focused on how far you’ve fallen. So you’re constantly – your brain is constantly stuck in this loop of like, you’ve fallen so far, you’re never going to get back up again, and you’re literally keeping yourself stuck in that place with your thinking and then you’re wondering why you can’t seem to get motivated to do anything.

Because remember, our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings drive our actions. So if 35,000 thoughts a day are you suck, you’re so far from where you used to be, this is horrible, of course you’re going to feel terrible and you’re not going to be motivated to do anything and then you’re going to wonder why, and you’re just going to keep giving yourself more evidence that you’re a failure. It’s really not fun. It’s not fun. I know you know that it’s not fun because you’re in it right now.

So here’s what I want you to do: I want you to start actively paying attention to what your brain is doing and start spending your thoughts on where you want to go. And when I say spending your thoughts, I like to think of my thoughts as money. If I have $50,000 a day to spend, you can be damn sure I would not be putting $35,000 of that on something that wasn’t going to get me a result I wanted. I wouldn’t be standing on my fourth-floor balcony throwing that money off the side and wondering why I had no money, right?

I would be like, using it to do things to invest in myself, to pay my rent, to maybe buy a new car or something like that. I would spend those thoughts on things that I want to do, places that I want to go, rather than just throwing it away. So start spending your thoughts on where you want your future to be. Not where your past has been.

So you’re going to be tempted to fall back into old patterns because you’ve practiced thinking those negative things about yourself so much. You’re just really good at it. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with you that you’re thinking those thoughts. It means you’re human and you’re really good at thinking what you’re practiced.

So when you find yourself thinking those negative things, you’re just going to redirect. You’re going to say, “Oh, that’s right, we’re going to think differently about ourselves now. We’re working on it, we’re practicing a new way of thinking. Remember that you’re looking forward now.” Concentrate on the one thing that you can do today, the one thing you can do right now to move yourself into the future that you want.

That might be going for a run, it might be going on runningintheUSA.com and picking out a goal race. It might be talking to a running coach to get some support. It could be anything, but whatever it is, I want you to focus on thinking of ways that you can take action to go forward instead of spending all your time and energy focusing on how you’re not who you used to be. Because that thinking is keeping you stuck. When you’re spending all your time thinking about where you used to be, you have no energy, no thoughts for where you want to be.

Alright, so every day I want you to spend your thoughts on moving one step forward. It won’t happen overnight but practicing thinking about creating your future will get easier. The more you do something, the easier it gets, so practice thinking about creating your future. It’ll get easier and you’ll start to see results.

And you know that I would love to help you with that. I’m actually really good at helping my clients stop being assholes to themselves. In other words, to help them get out of their past and get into their future. So if you want to be at the New Orleans race with me and 10 other really amazing women in February, I want you to sign up for a quick 10-minute call with me at talktojill.com and we’ll chat about it.

So there’s no obligation, just a 10-minute call, we’ll talk about whether it’s a good idea for you. Just go to talktojill.com, there’s a little bit about the program there and then there’s a button at the very bottom so that you can sign up for a call with me and we’ll talk about it.

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Okay, let’s dive into half marathon training again. And you might wonder why we keep talking about it, and sure, it’s partly because I’m taking 10 women to do New Orleans Rock n Roll half together and I’m going to train them all over the next year to do it, but really this is the season to start thinking about half marathon training. In fact, June and July is when most people start training for their fall races.

So if you’re planning to do a race in say, October or November, now is the time to get started. So the first thing I want to cover is kind of how to pick a race. Because if you’re a newbie, it’s important to pick the right race, or you might not really have a very good experience.

And 13.1 miles is far. It’s a distance to run. Three miles, you can do that 40 minutes, 45 minutes, maybe an hour. But if you are a not your average runner, it might take you – you know, if you’re doing say, a 15-minute mile or 16-minute mile, it might take you three and a half, up to four hours to do a half marathon. And if you’re doing more like a 20-minute mile or a 22- minute mile, it could take you up to five hours.

And so it’s really important to keep that in mind when you’re deciding what race you want to do. Because a lot of half marathons have a really long time limit, but some of them don’t. So when you’re picking your race, the first thing you need to do is think about how fast you can do a 5K, and let’s say you’re doing a 5K in 14-minute mile, so that’s about 42 minutes, you want to add a couple minutes per mile to your pace because when you’re going to do a half marathon, you’re naturally going to slow down if you want to be running for 13 miles versus three miles. That’s just how the body works.

So for example, if you do a 5K in 42 minutes, which is about a 14-minute mile, you would calculate that your half marathon time would be at about a 16-minute mile, which is roughly in the neighborhood of three and a half hours. So then you want to look for races that allow you to finish in three and a half hours, preferably a four-hour time limit. I think that’s like, a really great time limit because that means that the finish line and everything is still going to be up at the four-hour time limit.

So if you think you’re going to be pushing it to get across the finish line in four hours, you want to look for something with a longer time limit. But figure out how long you think it’s going to take by adding about two minutes per mile to your current 5K time and then calculate that out.

Now, one way that I think is kind of like a little hack is if you can find a half marathon that has a marathon at the same time, your half marathon is almost definitely going to have the same time limit as the full marathon. Because they’re not going to take down the finish line at like, four hours when there’s still people finishing a marathon. So that’s a really easy way, and I know a lot of the Rock n Roll races do that. They’ll have a marathon and a half marathon at the same time, so that’s a really easy way to identify a race that’s going to have a longer time limit.

But you can also just check on the website. Sometimes it’s hard to find, you might have to like, dig around a little bit, and if you can’t find a time limit, you just email the race director and find out. But it’s really, really important for you to know that before you send the money and sign up for a race.

So there’s absolutely nothing wrong if you need to take five hours to finish a half marathon. I’m all in for that. Like, you know that I’m all about like, you run whatever pace you want to run. I just want to make sure that you’re going to get the experience you want, which is to actually cross that finish line and get your race medal at the end.

So another way to find races that have a longer time limit is to look for bigger races. So if the half marathon has only 100 people, chances are it’s more of a local race that’s going to be geared towards maybe local running clubs and they’re more than likely going to be runners that are going to finish the race in three hours or less.

And also, here’s the deal. Like, a half marathon – first of all, you have to close 13 miles of roads, you’ll have to close them for several hours. It’s not just for the race itself obviously, it’s for a few hours before the race so they can set up all of the aid stations and it’s for a couple hours after the race because they’ve got to clean everything up.

So if you think about it, if you’re doing a race in a big city, closing down 13 miles of roads in a city is a big fucking deal. You have to get all of the city services on board, you have to get all the permits, and then of course you have to deal with all the cars that can’t drive on those roads and they have to be redirected.

So it’s not just about like, they’re lazy and they don’t want to keep the thing open long enough for me to finish. It’s really about the city and the permits and the amount of money it costs to keep those roads open so that everyone can finish. And so it really – it has nothing to do with not being inclusive and everything to do with the budget that the race has to actually do all those things.

So the bigger the races, the bigger the budget, and the more likely that they’re going to have a longer time limit, and the more likely that everybody else in the race is going to be – that there’s going to be a wider variety of paces and body types and runner types. There might even be walkers at a bigger race.

So sometimes people think, “Oh, I’m really scared, I don’t want to do my first race as one of those big races because I’ll be intimidated.” I want to tell you it’s exactly the opposite. Like, the bigger race means there’s going to be more people like you, there’s going to be more than likely a longer time limit, and there’s going to be more course support. So that’s my suggestion to you is to look for one of those and then also try to find one that has a marathon at the same time.

And I know for sure the Rock n Roll half marathons, almost all of them have a minimum of four hours, and most of them have a little bit longer. But if you go to their website, they have all the information there. And I’ve also compiled a list on my own website of races that I know of that have a five or more time limit, and so that list is – it’s on my website. If you go to the show notes for this episode, there’ll be a link to that and you can check that out.

And of course, if you know of some, if you go to that list and you see – you look at that races and you’re thinking, oh, she’s missing this amazing race that I know about, please feel free to use the contact form on my website and let me know. Make a suggestion and I’ll keep updating the list.

Now, the other thing we need to think about with how to pick a race is the altitude and the terrain. So if you want to do a trail running race, which is awesome, they’re super fun, make sure that you’re able to train on trails. Because there’s a big difference, just like there’s a difference between running on the treadmill and running on a road, if you’ve ever trained for a race exclusively on a treadmill and then gone out and done the race on the road and you’re wondering why it feels so hard, it’s because there’s a big difference.

So the same thing goes for if you’re going to be doing a hilly race but you’re going to be training on a flat surface, like if you live in Kansas and it’s really flat and then you’re going to be training for a race in say, Colorado where it’s more hilly, at least some parts of Colorado, then you need to make sure that you are picking a race that’s going to be something you can prepare for.

So if you want to do a trail run, that’s awesome, make sure you can train on trails. If you want to do a hilly race, that’s awesome, make sure you can train on hills. And then obviously, you need to do all your training outside because there’s really no such thing as a treadmill half marathon, at least not that I’m aware of. So if you’re unable to train outside, maybe a half marathon isn’t the best choice for you.

The other consideration that I want you to remember is – and this happened to a bunch of my runners who decided to do the Denver half marathon a couple years ago. We did a retreat and they all said, “Oh yeah, we want to do this race too.” Now, some of them were from Colorado or from mountainous states and they were used to running at altitude, and then some of them were not. And I’ll tell you what, if you’re going to run a race that’s at altitude in Denver for example, it’s a mile above sea level. This is a long distance to be above sea level and it makes a difference.

So it’s not to say you can’t do one of those races, but you want to get to the race site, you want to get to that city a few days before the race so you can acclimate. So that’s just something to remember like, if you’re going to pick a race that you’re going to run at a high altitude, make sure that it’s a time of year and it fits in your schedule that you can travel there a little bit early so that you can run a little bit at altitude and find out what it’s going to do to your body.

Okay, so that’s what you want to consider when you’re picking a race, and there’s tons of other little bits and pieces of things that we could talk about, but those are really the big things. And obviously, if you have any questions about hey, is this a good race for me, make sure that you join The Not Your Average Runner Podcast Facebook group because we talk about this kind of stuff all the time.

If you join the group, it’s at notyouraveragerunner.com/jointhecommunity, and then you can just ask everybody in there, have you done this race, is this good for beginners, like, there are 6000 women in that group and they know their shit. So there’s almost always going to be someone in there that’s done the race that you’ve done and they can tell you what to expect.

Now, I want to touch on training plans real quick, especially if it’s your first half marathon and you’ve never gone longer – gone farther than three miles, I want you to make sure that your training plan is at least four months long. Because building yourself up from three miles to 13 miles, totally possible within a few months, but at least four months, okay? So you want to ramp your mileage up very, very slowly, and a lot of times people think, “Oh, I should just add a mile every week and then if I want to go from three miles to 13 miles, in 10 weeks I’ll be there.”

Please don’t do that. You’re probably going to end up getting injured and then you might not be able to do your race, or you will do your race and it’s going to suck. So make sure that you take the time. So if you’ve got a race that you’re looking at and you’re thinking, you know what, it’s two months away, I’m going to train like I would cram for an exam, I’m just going to run, run, run, run, run, and then I’ll do the race and I’ll be prepared, it’s not how it works. You cannot cram your training into a short period of time.

So I recommend if you’re going to pick a training plan, make sure it’s four months. Make sure that it ramps your mileage up no more than one mile every other week. So you should have a long run one week and then the next week you scale it back. And then the next week that long run will be a mile longer and then you scale it back. And this allows your body to rest and adapt, and sometimes you even want to go three weeks in between adding a mile.

And the other thing, this myth is out there that you need to run 13 or 14 miles before you do your first half marathon. You don’t. And I actually don’t recommend it because if it’s your first time, you know, your body is still getting used to those long-distance runs.

Now, if you’ve been doing half marathons for a while, I’m all in if you want to do a 13 miler, or a 14 miler a couple weeks before your race, go for it. But if it’s your first one or even your second one, you really don’t need to go more than say, 11 or 12 miles as your longest training run before race day. And I promise you, you’re going to be fine, you’re still going to finish your race, and you’re much more likely to avoid injury and to enjoy it if you don’t kind of go the whole distance before race day.

And the last thing I want to tell you about your training plan is you don’t have to run the whole time. You can do intervals, and I know that we talk about intervals all the time. And if you go back to one of my earlier episodes, which I – offhand I cannot quite remember the number, but I’ll make sure there’s a link in the show notes. Go back to one of my earlier episodes where I talk about how to pick the best run-walk interval ratio for you.

So if this is your first half marathon, you definitely want to do run-walk intervals. It’s going to make your training a lot easier, it’s going to make race day a lot easier, and overall, you’re much less likely to get injured and everybody else does it. So I promise you, on race day, you’re going to see all these people running and walking, and running and walking, and running and walking. It’s super common.

So those are my pieces of advice for you on how to pick a training plan and how to train for this race. I kind of think everybody should do a half marathon because I think it’s a good mental challenge, it’s a good physical challenge, it’s not something that everybody wants to do all the time, but I do think it’s great as like, a sort of a badge of honor as a runner. Like, yeah, I did a half marathon, now I can cross that off my bucket list.

So I hope you do one, and if you want to talk to me about doing the New Orleans half marathon, I know I’ve already mentioned this once but it’s really going to be so freaking fun, you guys. So fun. I’m trying to figure out how I can get a limo to drive all of my runners to the race site. Like, that’s the kind of fun that we’re going to have at this race. So you can do that by signing up for a quick call with me at www.talktojill.com, and we’ll chat about it.

Okay, that’s it for this week. Everything I mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com/31, including the link to sign up for Stitch Fix and grab 25% off your first shipment. Don’t forget, that is stitchfix.com/selflove. It’s going to be in the show notes, I really hope that you grab a fix. I got a fix coming, I’m going to talk about it in a couple weeks, I’ll be back talking about it and I’m going to share a million pictures on Instagram and Facebook of course because you know, that’s how I roll.

And if you’ve decided that after all my babbling on about running, running, running, if today is the day that you’re going to start, grab your free jumpstart plan over at notyouraveragerunner.com/start. That’s it for this week and I’ll talk to you later. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to www.notyouraveragerunner.com to download your free one-week jumpstart plan and get started running today.