30 seconds per mile?? Excellent. I'm going to be SO fast now!
That's great about your knee - and a nice warning to all of us not to undertrain!
I'm in Randolph, NJ - about 35 miles due west of New York.
My running is going surprisingly well. I took a week off after Chicago and then started on Runner's World's 10 week "Learn to Run for 30 minutes" plan which has worked for thousands of people. I was positive that I was special and that I would be the one person that it didn't work for since I could barely run for 5 minutes straight. But seeing as I was claiming to have run a marathon I decided that I ought to be able to run a whole mile. I say claiming - I ran for 1 3/4 minutes and walked for 1 1/4 and repeated that 3 minutes over and over (and over) so there was more time spent running than walking. A big improvement over walking the marathon the previous year. Anyway the plan worked - and on Jan 1st I ran for 30 minutes. Slowly. But who cares? I'm never going to be fast - my dream is 3 miles in under 30 minutes - your 30 seconds are going to be very helpful. :p
I was lucky enough to get a place in the London marathon and am following Hal's novice plan again. I try to run the short runs totally and use walking and running for the longer ones since that is what will happen in the marathon. This week I ran FOUR miles without walking which, for me, is totally unbelievable - and I could have kept going. I think.
But unfortunately I got a stinker of a 2 week cold in late January and barely ran for 3 weeks and the fitness suffered. Then I discovered that my green card notification is unlikely to arrive in time and if I leave the states I won't get back in, so I'm deferring my entry to next year.
I'm probably going to do the NJ Shore marathon on April 27th since that gives me a couple of extra training weeks (and it's very close), although I DO fancy the Cincinnati Flying Pig on May 4th (the medal's adorable - and what a great name!!) and I have a friend doing Pittsburgh. So I'm training but not 100% sure what for!
Apart from that, I'm contemplating Chicago again this year. I really need goals to keep me running, so marathons are good in that they make me run for 18 weeks, but the training IS rather invasive. I'm considering your half marathon plan... I'm probably considering it because tomorrow I have to run 15 miles and the longest I've done so far is 12 (been building the miles up slowly after being off sick) so it seems rather a long way.
