This is a race the wife wanted to do to get a 1/2 under her belt. Since I was regularly doing 3+ hr trail runs for 9 Trails training, I figured I could throw in another 1/2 marathon like it was nothing. I didn’t want to race it too fast and potentially take myself out of commission for a few weeks, so I figured on finishing somewhere between an hour 32 and and hour 45. That seemed perfectly doable since the course isn’t very hilly and has almost no net altitude change.
The first 3 miles I was afraid I started out to quick. Actually, at first I thought they had mis-marked the miles when I was at 6:29, 6:26 and 6:22 for the first 3 splits. I didn’t want a repeat of the quad failure I experienced during the marathon and ever since that last Nite Moves my left hamstring and adductors have been mega-tight. But since I thought the mileage was wrong and I was feeling pretty great anyway, I maintained and had pretty much no issues. At mile 8 I knew I would break 90 minutes even if I slowed it down. That was a good feeling. Most of the course felt like it was slightly down hill which helped a lot. The last 2 miles were a bit tougher, but I still kept up the pace. What a great race! And 10 minutes after finishing I felt fine! Splits: 6:29, 6:26, 6:22, 6:03, 7:06, 6:28, 6:23, 6:46, 6:37, 6:51, 6:47, 6:16, 7:33 (1.1 mi).
The only downer (as the title suggests) is that even though I came in almost the top 3%, I was 7th in my age group. Lots of fast 30-34 year olds that day. But I did get a Top 100 finisher mug and I came super close to breaking into the 70th percentile for age grading.
There’s a few photos from early on in the race and one near the finish. Oddly, they got really nice pictures of the guy in front of me and the guy behind me, but none of me. So I had to settle for being in the background of someone else’s picture.
Time: 1:26:07 Pace: 6:34
Place: 21/677 overall, 20/318 men, 7/35 M30-34
Age graded: 69.8%