rest day and Austin 1/2 plan

I went back and forth about running today. I woke up with a plan to run but it was raining so I figured I'd wait since I had all day to get it in. Then I thought about taking today off. It started clearing up so I thought about running again, but then it started raining again...so I made the final decision to take a rest day. My last off day was 10 days ago...so it is probably time. I am going to "race" the half on Sunday so this is a down week for me. I want to use this race as a way to wrap my brain around running faster times. Essentially, I'm asking myself to run a 1/2 marathon at the pace which I used to run 5ks and 10ks at...which is kind of a scary thing for me to be ok with. I know I'm more fit now and I'm ready for more aggressive racing, so I'm hoping this 1/2 marathon allows me to get comfortable with the fact that my goals times now are times which never used to register as potential paces for shorter races. With that said, I'm going to outline my plan for Austin. It still looks crazy to me, especially since the end of the course is going to be rough...but I think if I get it out there then I'll have more accountability to the plan. So here it is:
-start the race up Congress at 6:40 pace and hold this through mile 3
-heading down 1st, drop the pace to 6:20 (it's all downhill)
-hit 6:28 pace up Caesar Chavez and around Austin High School
-start to drop the pace gradually on Lake Austin Blvd back to 6:20
-survive Enfield at the same pace...GUT CHECK
-all out last mile...

So my pace band will look like this:
1: 6:40
2: 13:20
3. 20:00
4. 26:20
5. 32:40
6. 39:00
7. 45:28
8. 51:56
9. 58:21
10: 1:04:41
11. 1:11:01
12. 1:17:16
13.1: 1:23:45


There are going to be hills which will cause some bumps in the road at the end...but it's only the last 3 miles so basically it's just a huge gut check to see what I'm made of right now. If I stick to this plan then I should end at around 1:23:45 with my hard close. I'm excited to race and look back at this and see how close I can come!

pluses: productive day around the house

minuses: my puppies stink!