It’s inevitable that life is going to get in the way of training for a marathon. A lot can happen during those 18 weeks and it’s not a bad thing, but it can be a challenge.

This week, my family is visiting from Taiwan….TWELVE OF THEM for two weeks! Oh, in case you didn’t know, I’m half Taiwanese and half Caucasian. I actually just almost typed “half American,” but that would be an incorrect statement. I’m 100% American no matter what my national origins are. I always get comments like, “you don’t look mixed” or “you look like you are something,” and I sometimes tilt my head and think…”I look like I’m something? What is that supposed to mean?” My picture in on the About page if you’re curious as to what “something” looks like. Anyways, I digress.

My family came in on Tuesday which was supposed to be the day I did my 2 mile time trial at the track. Since I’m a little OCD about my numbers, it killed me to know that I had to miss this. What was I supposed to do? Ask them to change their flight plans so that I can do my time trail? I can certainly try and to it on my own, but frankly…I don’t wanna. I’d rather do it with my training group and my coach.

Time trials are a good way to monitor the progress of your speed and endurance. You run two miles on the track as hard as you can (without collapsing of course, but close!) and note the times for mile 1 and mile 2. Ultimately, you want mile 2 to be faster than mile 1, which is called a negative split.

So, if you clock your time at 1 mile at 10:00 and at mile 2 you clock in at 19:30, it means your first mile was 10:00 and your second mile was 9:30. This is called a negative split as your second mile is faster than your first and this is what you want.

If you clock your time at 1 mile at 10:00 and at mile 2 you clock in at 20:30, it means your first mile was 10:00 and your second mile was 10:30. This is called a positive split as your second mile is slower than your first. This isn’t a horrible thing. It just lets you know you’ve got some work to do.

We typically do 2 mile time trials at the beginning of training and near the end of training so we can see the progress that we made. For me…it’s all about progress so not having my first set of numbers to compare with my second set is going to nag me.

I’ll get over it. Eventually.

I’ll blog as much as I can during the next two weeks, but please don’t frown on me if it’s sporadic. Hope everyone has a wonderful 4th of July!