Running Down the Dream: How to Run a Half Marathon PR in 15 Easy Steps: 2015 Waddell & Reed Kansas City Half Marathon

Post-race

1) Run a familiar event.

This race is routine for me. I completed the full marathon at this event in 2005, 2007, and 2011 (early on I believe it was simply called the Kansas City Marathon, and also ran a different course). I ran the half marathon distance at the event in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2014. This is one race I’ve run when I’ve been injured and not even running or remotely fit. My sister and her family live in Kansas City, and it’s become a tradition for me and my parents, who live in the Wichita area, to visit them every October over race weekend. We have all watched this event grow from a small marathon to a nationally-known competitive event.

2) Win a free entry.

I won a free entry for life into the event in 2011 in a photo contest -- possibly the best prize I have ever won! In 2010 I received an elite comp entry, so I have received a comp entry for the past 6 races. I would absolutely pay the entry free to run this race, but a comp entry and family to stay with makes it that much sweeter!

3) Don’t make it a goal race.

My season goal race is the full marathon in Dallas, and my half goal race has been ever changing, but it was never Kansas City. Who tries to PR on a course with around 580 feet of elevation gain anyway?

4) Make sure the course is hilly, and the race extra competitive.

See #3. The course is tough, but it’s also deceptively fast if you’ve trained well on hills (and don’t all of us living in the Ozarks train on hills by default?). You climb a lot in miles 2-3 and 7.5-10.5, but you come down a lot from 4-6, and again from 10.5 to 12.

This was my first race in quite a while where I wasn’t gunning for an overall female or top 3 female placing. Past results showed the top 3 women consistently running under 1:20, something I’m not capable of. This helped me during the race because I didn’t focus on, or even know, where I was place-wise (I ended up 5^th overall female, which I was ecstatic about).

5) Work with a coach.

I started working with a coach for the first time since college in July 2015, because I decided I needed to go all in to try for a sub-3:00 marathon. This has changed the way I train, and I have hit paces and workouts I never thought I could.

This has also shown me what a control freak I am! I have had some very challenging workouts, but the biggest challenge has been giving up control of my schedule. It was clearly a good decision for me though!

6) Don’t listen to your coach.

I am probably a bit of a nightmare to coach. I am the one who adds a few miles here, a race there, and a tempo run there (not to mention I shuffled several races around while I was recovering from cryptosporidium at the end of the summer). My coach told me to run Kansas City as a workout. I know he was looking at my long-term goal of a PR at the Dallas Marathon, and I really considered listening to him. In the end, I couldn’t justify driving 3 hours each way to the event without racing it, and I also really wanted to see where I was at with my half time at this point in my training.

7) Find a training partner with similar goals, and push each other to speed up your long runs.

When my coach advised me to do my long runs around 7:30 pace, I panicked a little. In past marathon training cycles, my long runs were at a relaxed easy pace, which rarely dipped under 8:00 pace. I even remember one hot 23 miler before my PR marathon that I ran over 9:00 pace – over 2:00 slower than what I ended up running for my marathon! I felt comfortable with 12-14 milers at 7:30 pace, but the thought of doing 20-24 at that pace running alone terrified me.

Fortunately, though a mutual friend I connected with Jamie, who was also chasing a sub-3:00 marathon and had quite the impressive collegiate resume (I knew because I Googled her before I knew her, after she beat me at the Medical Mile 2.5 mile “5K”). I was really excited to find a female to train with, even though I feared she would be too fast for me!

We started meeting for Saturday long runs, and quickly realized that we were the perfect match on these runs (plus, she is an awesome person in addition to being a talented runner). In fact, she and I seem to be so evenly matched in our paces, I think anytime we race each other it will simply come down to who has a little better day. Neither of us could imagine running the paces we hit on our hilly training routes alone, but when running together it was easy. I never thought I would run 20 miles with over 1300 feet of elevation gain at 7:25 pace and call it easy, but I believe speeding up my long runs and running them on tough courses was the biggest training change that contributed to my PR in Kansas City. In addition, running the race with Jamie was instrumental to the PR, as she pushed me throughout and made me feel like I was on a training run, only with near silence instead of constant chatter!

See how closely matched we are?

8) Have the most supportive, yet somewhat doubtful spouse.

My husband is extremely supportive of my running, and as a runner himself he understands what it takes to PR. He is interested in my workouts, my splits, and my races, and he never complains about the abnormal things I do for the sake of running. He encourages me and not only spectates at all my races, but genuinely wants to be there (even when I offer to find a sitter for our daughter so that he can race too, he usually responds with, “I would rather watch you!”). All in all, he couldn’t be more perfect, but he was pretty doubtful that I could run a PR at Kansas City – so much so that he offered to find a “good half course” for me to run instead that weekend and complained that I was wasting my PR-level fitness on this event. I was stubborn – I wanted to visit my family and run Kansas City, and I was determined I could PR there!

9) Make the most obsessive pace band in the history of the world.

Since I have run Kansas City so many times, I knew a consistent pace strategy would never work. There are some fast net downhill miles on the course, and there are some slow primarily uphill miles. And I had my race data from 4 previous halves there to refer to! I analyzed all of my past splits, along with the course elevation chart, and came up with a formula to get to me to a 1:26 finish. The fastest planned mile was 6:12, and the slowest was 6:59, but the goal splits averaged 6:37. This was a more painstaking process than I expected going in (the initial strategy was just to take off 10 seconds per mile from my splits from when I ran a 1:28 on the course, but I quickly made it more complicated than that!).

10) Form an unofficial pace group with PR goals.

Jamie and I planned to run Kansas City together and push each other, just like in training. I also connected with Jerry, after pacing off of him for the Panther Run 10K at the beginning of October. He wanted to run a 1:26 also, so our unofficial official OMRR PR-chasing pace group was formed! Even though it wasn’t a goal race…

11) Pee behind a dumpster.

Believe it or not, this was integral to the PR! I used an actual bathroom in Crown Center before starting my warm-up, but after a 2 mile jog and plyometrics I knew I needed to go again but didn’t have time to go back to Crown Center or the porta-john area, then get back to the starting line in time. With the race being in an urban area, there weren’t a lot of options, but a few blocks away from the starting line I found an area tucked away between buildings with several dumpsters that provided the best possible option. After all, no one can PR with a full bladder!

12) Start out too fast.

Ironically, my #1 strategy in races is to never start out too fast, because you will always, always pay for it later. Although our first mile was slow, after the field thinned out significantly Jamie, Jerry, and I kept clicking off miles faster than my obsessive pace band planned pace, and the miles really flew by. In the end we ran negative splits, so the too fast start was just relative!

13) Run the middle miles too fast, and stop looking at your Garmin and doing the math.

We kept passing course miles faster than our planned pace, and it felt like a challenging but do-able half pace. I stopped looking at our pace, as it was super intimidating! My previous half PR was 1:27:08 – 6:39 pace – and I knew we were averaging somewhere in the 6:20’s and mentally I just couldn’t fathom that. Usually in longer races I will take inventory of where I’m at time-wise and project my finish time, and although I knew we were on PR pace I couldn’t quite comprehend our split times. At some of the course miles I checked our progress and let the others know that we were under pace, and hoped I wouldn’t bonk!

14) Run the final 5K in 19:10.

Miles 11 and 12 of this course are fast, and Jamie and I were pulling in another female quickly which really spurred us along. Our mile 12 split was 5:59, which I would never have expected in anything over a 5K. The final mile flattens out before a challenging long incline to the finish, but I managed a 6:10 final mile, and 6:05 pace for the last bit up the hill.

Coming down (actually up!) the final stretch, I was thinking that I might run a 1:25, but my math skills were out the window well before mile 12. Once I was close enough to read the clock, I realized that I would run a solid 1:24! My parents, husband, and daughter were on the sidelines screaming, and I crossed the line in 1:24:33 (6:27 average pace) – a bright and shiny new PR that was faster than I ever thought I could run. Jamie and Jerry also ran huge PRs! I don’t think I could ever have done it without running with them!

PR-ty time!

Garmin + obsessive pace band

15) Realize that you’re not dreaming, be thankful, and plan your next PR!

Just after Madam President Stephanie asked me to write this race report, I received an email with the subject line “It wasn’t a dream – KC Marathon/Half Marathon 2015 photos prove you did it”. The experience was a bit surreal and dream-like to me, so I am thankful for those photos, my Garmin data, and my official certified course time! It’s rare that I am completely satisfied with my performance, but for this race I was. I don’t think I could have run it any better, and taking my PR from 1:27:08 to 1:24:33 after several months of chasing a 1:25:59 was HUGE to me.

I am thankful that God gave me the strength to run a PR, and that He led me to training with someone with similar abilities and to working with a coach, as both were key in my performance (all of these blessings came to fruition through a lot of random events!). Now, I am going to find a flat course and chase a 1:23:59. One of the beautiful things about running is that you can always strive to improve on your best, and you always gain far more than PR along the way.