Post Partum Personal Bests

With race weekend just over a month away (gorp!) and my mileage starting to ramp up in earnest, I’ve been trying to squash the temptation to set a totally unrealistic time goal on what should just be a feel-good, half-marathon-distance romp – a celebration of the fact that I can cover 21.1k in running shoes less than 5 months after having a baby. (And let’s face it, since it’s a precious window of time where I won’t have to change a diaper, rock anyone to sleep, or – hopefully – get puked on, I should probably be aiming to drag it out as long as possible.) But sadly, that’s not the way I roll.

The question becomes, then, how to set a motivational-yet-realistic goal when I’m 1000% certain that I’m not going to be back in prime racing form by race day. “Prime racing form,” as defined by my pre-baby personal best, is a 1:42 half-marathon, though I considered anything in the 1:40’s to be a strong racing effort. These times were typically run during peak marathon training, though, when I was about ten pounds lighter and logging nearly double the mileage I am now – approx 70-80k a week, vs, the 35-40k of the present day. Oh, and those training miles were WAY faster.

To re-work my expectations in an appropriate way, I’m starting from the place of knowing that WHATEVER time I run on May 30th will be what my friend Tori terms a PPPB – a Post Partum Personal Best. I love the notion of the PPPB because it acknowledges how much our physical and emotional lives have been transformed by having a baby, and how any race effort thereafter is an unquestionable personal best. If I show up at the start line, I get a PB. And given how little sleep I’ve been getting lately, it will no doubt be one of the hardest fought PBs of my life.

That said, I always like to have some sort of number in mind. So, in order to make things interesting, I fed my 5k time from when I was 6 months pregnant (26:55) into the McMillan Calculator, and it’s given me a projected half-marathon time of 2:04:25. I figure as long as I can run faster than I did heading into my third trimester of preggo-ness, I’m doing alright. And if it takes me longer – well, you’ll know I decided to take the scenic route in order to dodge one more diaper change.