Half-marathon calendar

I'm part of my University half-marathon team. Its not a competitive team, there is just a requirement to run 5 half-marathons a year in order to maintain your place in the team, and then the Uni provides kit and pays for entry and transport to all the runs that you want to enter. All in all its a really good deal. Anyway, this week I got the definitive calendar of events for the coming academic year. There is a list of eight to choose from, so it will be a question seeing where they fit with my marathon training. Last year I had a problem that I missed a 2 of the first 4 as I was going to the UK, and had only 3 done when I got injured, as a result it was a bit of the struggle to get the 5 done at the end of the year. This year I'm planning to do all the early ones so I can pick and choose around marathon time.

Here is the calendar for the next couple of months:

15th November - Elda Half Marathon
20th December - Aspe Half Marathon
24th January - Santa Pola Half Marathon

I did both Elda and Santa Pola last season, but Aspe is a new one for me. Elda last year was a bit of a disaster, I went in undertrained and ended up struggling a lot in the second half of the race, I'm a lot better prepared for this time. I suffered a little as its a bit higher up than where I'm living and there is a really big temperature difference as you pass from in the sun to the shade. Santa Pola is a popular race, the biggest that I've done here, its really well organised, with a fairly good course, I ran 1:34:41 there last January.

With all the training I've been doing, now I'm really looking forward to putting myself in a race to see what I can do.