After the Santa Barbara Half Marathon a few weeks ago, I was seriously turned off from running after having a pretty bad race (despite my PR), which only lasted about one or two days (not surprisingly). I didn’t want to sign up for another race and I figured I’d just go to bootcamp every day instead. Again, that lasted for a very short amount of time. Now I’m itching to sign up for another half marathon, sometime early next year. I’m actually already registered for the San Diego Half Marathon on March 9 (which I’d love to do since it was my very first half), but like I said before, I’m not sure if Jeremy and I will still be in California in March. I found out about the Mermaid Series Half Marathon on February 8, and it’s an all-women race that’s really close to where my grandma lives in Pacific Beach. I looked at some reviews online of past races, and it seems to be a popular one.

It’s pretty pricey, but seems to be a good fit. There are a slew of other races I’d love to do, but sometimes it’s hard to choose the perfect race. It will be my third half marathon, so I’m still fairly new to running longer races and not 100% confident in my ability to know how much time I need to give myself between them.

February 8 is about two months away, which brings up another issue. Most half marathon plans are 12 weeks long, but I’m looking at about 8 weeks. It seems like that would be plenty of time since my last half was last month, but I’m so paranoid about getting injured that I don’t want to overdo anything. But do I necessarily need to follow a plan from the beginning if I just ran a half? So many questions and things to consider! Not to mention we’re going to Georgia/Tennessee from Christmas Eve-January 11, so I need to consider how much I’ll realistically be able to train during that time. I plan on running a ton when we’re in Athens (especially because we’ll be eating our way through our old favorite restaurants), but we’ll be in the mountains in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for four days in a cabin, and it may be snowy and I don’t know if I’ll be able to run outside. But hopefully I can just plan around it and figure something out!

Can’t wait to be back in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Too bad we’re missing the fall foliage!