Oh yes definitely, I'm super super slow in longer runs (like 11:00-11:30 miles for anything over 8 miles) but that is already over a minute faster per mile than I was in April. I'm really competitive and I was so frustrated knowing that during my first half marathon people were finishing as I was getting to the 10K mark. But everyone has to start somewhere!
It's pretty normal for your pace to drop as you go further. Exaggerated example but you aren't going to be able to run your fastest mile pace for 10 miles. There's various websites (McMillan Running - Calculator you can go to that will calculate what you're expected pace is based on a shorter distance time. Example my fastest 10K time is 1:08 (10:57 pace) and it says that my projected 1/2 time would be 2:31 (11:34 pace) based on that. What you are doing is almost exactly what I'm doing, but I'm definitely not an expert so I may not have perfect advice lol. Another thing that I started doing though to make me faster was to add liberal walking breaks doing intervals. You may not have this problem but I struggled to continuously run once I got to higher miles, but once I started adding some walking breaks I actually dropped my overall pace about 1 minute/mile. I have breathing issues so this worked really well for me as I'm probably trying to add miles too quickly and my lungs can't keep up with my legs haha. I plan on working on straight running with no breaks once I finish this marathon in January though.
Haha yes I would love to! I'll probably need a good month or two to recover from that. I'm not sure how many there are around here in the spring especially with Nike Women's moving to another city, still really upset about that since that was my first 1/2. I signed up for the lottery for the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler in mid-April so that may or may not happen. I won't be in the area anymore after May since I'll be on my clinical rotations for a year, but any time before that should be ok!
