This post should have been written a lot earlier. The Georgia Half Marathon took place in March. Then, there was work to wrap up. After that, there were South America, followed by Singapore, and now Paris.

Almost five months have passed, but I really want to write this post to summarise the things I did differently for my race preparation because what I ran for the Georgia Half Marathon this year was about the best I can do. I was close to my limit.

After running the same races for a few times, it was easy to treat the next race as just another race. Since this would have been the last time I would run the Georgia Half Marathon, I wanted it to be something different.

I resumed my Sunday long runs in January. Due to travel plans for work, I could not do much more in January and only started to properly train from February onwards. My longest run was 14 miles and I worked in three speed training sessions.

During the training period, I continued practicing pilates once a week, something which probably helped me avoid back pains during the race. Besides that, I went to see my massage therapist once a month. I do not know if the sessions by themselves were helpful, but they were definitely painful. The pain made me feel that the therapist was doing her job and I love the sense of satisfaction after subjecting myself to the pain. The “feel-good” effect of the massage sessions made me feel that they were already worth the while.

This time, I also added lunges to my programme. Exercises like this can be time consuming. To save time, I covered part of my walk home from the gym by doing lunges, sometimes with a bag of groceries in each hand if I do grocery shopping after gym. I usually ended up doing around 70 lunges in one session, something that left my gluts sore the following day, without fail. Again, I do not know if the lunges by themselves were effective. I record them as one of the ingredients of a regime that resulted in a successful race.

The weather was nice on race day – cool, but not too cold. I ran the race in tank and shorts, with the Supernova Sequence 3 that were 345 miles old. I did a proper warm up, which I think was very important in preparing my body to start the race in a proper condition. I started the race at the end of the field and I do not remember anything remarkable happened during the race. I just kept running, running and running and I caught up with the 2:30 pace team at the last mile.

Unlike during some past races, my lower back did not hurt during the last mile. I was probably a little tired by then, but I could still run. There was an improvement of more than 4 minutes over my previous best timing when I finished. This was my fifth time running the Georgia Half Marathon since its inauguration in 2007. For yet another time, this race was where my effort paid off where it concerned personal bests. I had my runner’s happy ending before saying goodbye to Atlanta.