I've just signed up for a 1/2 marathon the first weekend in May. At first, I was ok with it, but now I think I'm being overly ambitious.

I ran a marathon at the end of October, I trained for 6 months doing a run/walk ratio. After the marathon I did little to no running. I started running again in January, but only 2-3 times a week for a total of 4-6 miles a week. I've been doing other types of exercise though.

I was thinking of starting the 1/2 marathon training program for beginners on coolrunning. http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_4/134.shtml

I plan on starting tomorrow.

With February being a short month, I don't know if I even have the 12 weeks they recommend.

I feel really overwhelmed right now. Any suggestions or modifications any of you might have are most welcome. The course itself is supposed to be fairly hilly. Am I being too ambitious?

Thank you!

What are your aims for the race? If you've done a marathon before then I'd say that targetting a half in May doesn't sound too unrealistic, but it depends what your aims are. Aiming to do it as a run/walk and aiming to do it as a straight run are two different things!

I trained for my first half in less than 8 weeks (I had 8 weeks from deciding to do it, but did very little training for the last two of those with a holiday 2 weeks out and then a week of tapering). BUT I started from a base of running 10k (ish) a couple of times a week. If you're doing 4 - 6 miles a week spread out over several runs I guess you're not running that much at the moment. Is the reason you're not running that much at the moment because you can't or because you prefer to mix it up a bit. If you could run 10k but choose not to, you're obviously in a better position than if you couldn't do it even if you wanted.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are lots of variables. It is possible to train for a half in that timescale, but equally, building up from 2 miles to 13 is a long way.

Hi Helen,

I got pretty burned out on running after my marathon, so I switched to other forms of exercise. I haven't run more than 2.5 miles at a time in awhile, but I'm pretty confident I can run 4 miles without too much trouble. At the moment, I think I could run a 10k, but it would be really rough.

My goal for this half is to finish in a respectable time, which I think realistically for me, may be around 2.5 hours. I have a 1/2 marathon in September and for that one, I would like to run the whole thing. For this one, I expect I'll be walking some. But I don't know whether I should train like I'm attempting to run it straight through, or do the run/walk thing like I did for the marathon.

I've never trained on my own for a race. I've always been involved in a group, or atleast had a roommate training with me, but this time around it's just me. It's much more daunting when you're going at it alone.