Goal accomplished, if a bit delayed

I haven't been updating. I'm horrible at updating.
I start out with the best intentions, I work and rework posts in my head while I'm on the bus - sometimes I even write them down. Unfortunately, most of what goes on in my head never makes it into the blog. There are far too many distractions in my life for me to keep up with blogs it seems (when I have children, I forsee myself living in complete organizational chaos).

But, for the updates: I finally made it into my first half marathon.
I gave up on the winter run, it turns out I'll have to do a lot more work on overcoming my asthma before I'll be fit to run that long a distance in the cold. Right now, it cuts into my lung capacity too much - I've even started noticing a disturbing trend when swimming. Cold water (as in a lake) makes my reathing far more laboured than it should be. Jumping into a lake last weekend sent me into a spasm of dry, heaving coughs. I can only be thankful I'm a strong enough swimmer to collapse coughing and still keep myself comfortable afloat.

But, I digress, as always. The half marathon was part of Ottawa Race Weekend, held during the May long weekend each year. I planned on running it, but couldn't get into training seriously, as I discovered I was becoming unable to keep up with school. So, I took two weeks off running completely* then, six weeks befopre the race worked on bringing my distance up from 10k to 18k. I decided that would be my longest run beofr ethe race - the final 4k, after all, is just a bit of extra shuffling.

Training was hard, but running and training in the spring proved to be far easier than training in the Ottawa winter - especially with all the snow we had (added, of course, to my distaste for treadmills).
Despite continued problems with time, training progressed well despite the recurring blisters (same place, every week).

The run itself was amazing. Not because it was a good run, but because I've run with such a large group before. I noticed a fault in my training plan only 30 minutes into the run - I had been training for distance, but not hills, and the first half of the course had a lot of inclines. I also joined a pace group I was unable to keep up with, but that worked out in the end.

The spectators were amazing; with names printed alongside our numbers it was heartening to have so many people cheering for me by name, though for most of the race I simply assumed I was running near someone who shares my name and has a lot of friends.
By the end of the run, the course was crowded with people cheering us on and I was able to push myself in an honest run to the end.

With a goal of simply finishing, and hoping to make it near the 2:30 mark, I finished at under 2:25 by my chip time (it took us nearly 10 miutes to simply reach the start line from my place in the pack).
I'm thrilled with the time, though I do think I'll put more into training for the next one. I nearly collapsed at the finish, not out of exhaustion but out of the inability to breathe - the final run killed my overworked runs. I think I also worried one of the volunteers, who was kind enough to walk me to the recovery station where I grabbed a bottle of water and spent some quality time with my ventalin.

After that was a nice, if delayed, breakfast with friends, along with a couple bottles of water, and some time spent japping pins into my various blisters until the toned down enough for me to walk again.

Now, after some time to recover and a few short runs, I think I'll start back at one-hour runs and work my time and distance up from there at a slower rate.

*The two weeks I took off were due to health, not time. I planned on a week off, having had my wisdom teeth removed. Unfortunately I came down with a nice little infection that left me, for a few days, in too much pain to sleep, much less do anything more active than shuffle around the house. I took an extra week off, as I refused to run before I could get back into something resembling proper food again - I spent a week unable to either open or fully close my mouth.