Running in the rain, breathing, and signing up for my first two races

As my last post is from Monday and it's now already Friday I thought I fill you in on what I've been up to this week.
First of all, on Wednesday I had my first run in the rain. I know that's kind of hard to believe considering that I'm in New Zealand, it's winter and I've been running at least 3 days a week for the last 3 months. But I guess the weather has been on my side. Until this Wednesday that is. It was raining quite heavily and for a few seconds I thought about not going but then I thought what if it rains on the race day. Besides, it's just water :-)
And it turns out running in the rain is really not bad at all. While I was running it kind of felt like it was only really raining a little bit. It wasn't until I got back and noticed how wet all my clothes and especially my cap were that I realized how much it must have been raining. It's good to know that running in the rain is not a problem for me :-)

As part of improving my running technique I'm working on my breathing this week. It's kind of funny cause I feel like breathing should be easy, but it's totally not. It's actually quite difficult to breath in through my nose and then out through my mouth. It works fine in the beginning, but then when I get more tiered it's really difficult and I find my self breathing through my mouth all the time. So what I'm doing it I've shortened the running intervals a little, especially in the beginning. I used the start each of my runs with running as far as I could and then starting to walk - run -walk -run. I like doing this long bit in the beginning because it makes me feel good to know that I can run a little bit longer every week - was up to 8 minutes on Monday (-: But the problem is that towards the end my running intervals get shorter and shorter. Usually I do a few 1.30-2min intervals after the first long one, but towards the end I'm struggling to keep running for 1.30min. So on Wednesday I changed the strategy and only ran 3 minutes in the beginning, followed by 1 minutes walking - 3min running- 1 min walking -... (you get the idea). I was a lot fresher towards the end and my breathing was much better, so I'm guessing this is the way to do it. Still, it's weird having to concentrate so much just to breath right (-: Overall I did the same distance as on Monday in the same time and with the same amount of running, just spread more evenly across the distance (-:

I've also signed up for my first two races. I thought it would probably be a good idea to have one or two test races before the marathon to get a feeling for this type of thing. It also is a good training as it forces me to go the distance. The first one is a 14km race at the 11th of September (when I figured out that is only 7 weeks away I almost had a panic attack) and the second one a 16km on the 2nd of October (which is only 4 weeks before the half marathon - almost another panic attack). This means that I REALLY need to get my training plan sorted now otherwise this is probably going to kill me :-) So my mission for the weekend is to plan my training. I will probably tell you about it sometime soon!