Me and Ryan Hall - 13 weeks to the Rio Half Marathon

Firstly - thanks to all who added comments below. As Squirrel likes to point out in his blog, you can only dwell on your last race for so long (good or bad). I agree, although for me the time-frame is however long it takes for all the race photos to get published. While I like the ones I've posted, I am still waiting for that perfect shot, therefore-hence-ergo, I need to get in some more races.

Goal Setting for the Rio Half - The Rio Half is on October 12th (perfectly timed for the World Wide Half Marathon) and is the second half of the course from the Rio Marathon (so still all beach, just minus the zen-quiet bits). I ran this race last year after doing a 12 week SmartCoach training plan and went from a 2:03 first half-marathon to a 1:45. My splits for the 1:45 however were far less than ideal (by 5k it went 22/24/27/27/5, or going out in a 46 flat 10k and coming back in a 54 min 10k). This is the error I wanted to avoid in the two halfs I ran earlier this year and was successful (a 1:44 and a 1:46 both with only 1-2 minute drop between 10k's. I mostly attribute this success to the 4 months of base training I did leading up to the races (ie not doing any speedwork whatsoever is great for resisting the urge to shoot out of the gate).

As mentioned below, I want to drop below 1:40 for the half this year, and in kicking around training plans, staring at pace charts, and more specifically, plugging my 20:21 5k split into MacMillan's Calculator, I've come up with the following for a training goal:

1) I'm going to do the 10-week Ryan Hall Long-Training program printed in Runners World. It has a ton of speedwork (intervals, moderate and hard tempos and lots of race pace runs), and varies every other weekend between a long run and a Race-Pace run. Weeks average around 45 miles per week which should be plenty.
2) I'll be basing everything off running 4:30 kms (yeah, that is a minute faster per km than the marathon, but only 30 secs faster than the splits for the past 3 halfs).
3) 4:30 per km = 1:35 half finish so nice round numbers both for the finish time and the splits.

We'll see how things go but I am pretty comfortable that I can crank out the workouts where the intervals are a bit faster and the tempos are at, or just over that pace.

First test - 10k this Sunday: There is a little local 10k this weekend that was free, so I am signed up and will attempt to even split on 4:30's for a 45:00 10k. This would be a PR and a great indicator that my above-stated goal is right on. I have no idea what the course will look like so stay tuned. It could easily be a cluster-fuck like the 5.6km 5k from a month ago but since it's free, I won't complain much.

Last Rio fotos -- I swear: