Rob's blog

2018 surely has been an eventful year and we still have about a month and a half left! Turned 30 and traveled to Italy in March. Got engaged in July. Ran five races and set three new personal best times in half marathons between April-November. Plenty more happened of course but I'm here now to talk about the 2018 Richmond Half Marathon which was an INSANELY AWESOME run and I managed to run a nine minute personal record (PR) time!! My running has really turned a corner recently and I wanted to take some time to discuss the training, race and post race reflections on the weekend. This will be a long blog entry but I hope it'll be an interesting read to see what all went into making this race happen. Training In early August I started incorporating workouts back into my running routine in efforts to better my 5k time. A friend of mine who I've known online through a running/cycling community offered to help me with some coaching and workout advice and started having me fol

Five months between blog posts yet again. I promised I'd update more frequently, but unfortunately I continue to be terrible with updates. Better late than never though right? I ran the Clarendon Day 5k last weekend, my first time running this event and man was it fun! So much downhill, by far the fastest 5k course I've ever run. I trained for about six weeks for it with the help of a friend who has been coaching me a bit recently. I really want to break 20 minutes for a 5k, it's been a goal for a few years now but I never specifically focused on 5k workouts. There wasn't much time for it as I've been busy marathon training once a year for the past five years now. No marathon this fall has allowed for some changes in the running routine and it's been fun mixing it up. My six week training block for this race had it up's and downs. I ran 6 days a week with 3 of the days very easy and 3 of the days harder workout runs and 1 day completely off each week.

The Park to Park Half Marathon is in the books and as I was hoping(or dare I even say...expecting) a new personal record time to boot! 1:43:41, a time I can be very happy with considering the course and where my training has been the past month. I'm also encouraged because I feel I know exactly where I can improve as I reflect back on this race and how it played out as well. Course Description  The race is a point to point race that takes you from Stuarts Draft Park to Ridgeview park in Waynesboro VA. Scenic rolling hills through the quiet valley countryside with a few designated spectator spots, pretty much the polar opposite of my last event (NYC Marathon) but I was really looking forward to the peace and quiet here. The designated spectator areas were great and there was enough to look at and focus on that it made the miles go by relatively fast. (at least until near the end...) I was a bit worried about the "gently rolling hills." Race directors like to talk

Hello all, been a while since an update. It was a great winter, I backed way off with the mileage after NYC marathon in November and kept it that way for a good two to three months. I needed to recharge and focus on other priorities. January and February were also very challenging months work wise, with a couple weeks stretch with some serious overtime. That blew the running routine up quite a bit, but I was fine with that. I was still savoring the NYC effort, and I was finding time to get in some runs here and there, trying to stay healthy and eating (relatively) well. Overall it was a pretty easy winter to train through without too much snow/ice threats. We had one really cold two week stretch near the end of December and a couple smallish snow events but other than that it wasn't a particularly terrible winter weather wise. Amazingly I still haven't raced since the NYC marathon in November. Last year I ran four early season races but not this year, this has been my bigge

RACE REPORT - NYC Marathon I have so much to share it's hard to figure out where to begin. The entire NYC Marathon experience was unforgettable. I suppose I'll break this up into a few sections beginning with the training leading up to the race and then go through race day. This will be an extremely long post as I haven't sat down and written anything about running since probably early 2016, gotta make up for my lack of updates as of late. Training Overall I had a solid training block leading up to the marathon, not as good as 2014 but probably my second best out of the five marathons I've trained for. Mostly consistent running basically five days a week except for a nine day stretch in August where I went on an insane road trip to view the solar eclipse followed almost immediately by a trip to Florida which left little room for running. I fit in a couple short runs in the swampy weather in Florida that week but missed out on a quality long run and only ended up r