On Saturday I ran my 6th half marathon 17 seconds slower than my fastest time. Given my extremely small amount of mileage over the last few months, it’s fairly impressive. I am also almost 2 years old and fatter than I was when I ran 1:34:47 in Dublin in 2014. I am happy with how it turned out, but a bit annoyed that it was so close. Here is a write-up of the race.
I have barely run at all so far this year. I have only reached 25 miles in a week once. So I wasn’t expecting much from this race. When I signed up many months ago I was hoping for a better spring, but with 2 small children and busy work/life schedule it didn’t happen.
Thankfully I actually slept about 5 hours, which is very rare for me before a race. Got up about 5:30 and had a bagel with peanut butter and a banana and coffee.
Got there a bit early so mostly just sat in my car and occasionally used the restroom. I think I drank too much water in the morning as I had to pee like 3 times before the race, and then again right before the canon went off.
As usual everyone starts way too fast so I got swept up with the crowd all doing about 7 min miles, but that was ok with me as I was trying to get to a porta potty quickly so I could get it out of the way. I did that about mile 2
I feel like the GPS watch isn’t super accurate with my splits, so I can’t really comment on those. I didn’t see anything under 7 that I remember. They seemed pretty even in the low 7s.
Everything went surprisingly well and I passed a lot of people the first half. Things started getting more difficult after about mile 7. Thankfully the weather was fantastic, was was the crowd was really enthusiastic. I only took water once early, even though my mouth was a bit dry I don’t think I needed it.
At mile 10 my legs and feet were really sore but I found a few people who seemed to be pushing and tried to hang with them. As the race wore on, I began to get more optimistic about my showing today and tried not to overdo it but also to keep up the pace.
I was about out of gas from 12-13. I knew it would be close to a PR, so I gave it everything I had, but came up about 17 seconds short. Now i’m wondering what I could have done if I hadn’t had to pee the one time.
Final time of 1:35:04.
I think if I could put together a few months of 200 miles back to back I could probably go under 1:30, but maybe that’s a bit optimistic.
Learning to Fly 