So I am going to sign up for a 15 mile race 7 months from now. The entire race is at high altitude and a lots of elevation gain. I've only done 5ks before and I always have a lot of trouble with hills. I'm wondering what level of training I'm going to need to do to get better at hills, trails, and altitude. So far my road record for distance is 6mi and my trail record is 4mi.
Am I making a mistake or not (I'm doing this either way)?
7 months is lots of time, especially for running. And 15 miles is like, what, a little over a half marathon? Yeah the altitude might be a big adjustment but it's not hard to titrate yourself up to 24 km in 7 months.
I might suggest training a little closer to the full distance than you might normally otherwise to give you a bit of a chance with the altitude, but other than that you're fine if you train and stick with it.
(Also the stakes are pretty low, if the altitude gets the better of you you can just walk a few hills not that big a deal haha)
Good on you for pushing yourself comrade
The hard part honestly seems like finding the time. My target pace is 10min/mi as compared to by current training pace of 6:30/mi. I'll probably just get more comfortable in the dark. I'll try to stretch my long runs out a little longer.
Is this a typo? Did you mean it the other way around? Your target pace is slower than your current training pace?
And yeah running is time consuming especially when the distances get longer. When I'm training I just try to do one 10-15k run every weekend and when I have time I might do one moderate distance run in the week but mostly don't. You can still add distance pretty easily only doing that frequency.
This is my training pace for flat 4-5 mile run. The winner of this race averages 7:30/mi because it's so high and hilly. My strategy is to push longer for quick runs without changing pace, and go slower for long runs.