Half Marathon Race Recap, Part 1
I want to preface my race recap with a little disclaimer. Here it is: I am by NO means a serious athlete. I wasn't able to run a mile without stopping until my freshman year in college. The longest distance I had ever run, up until last summer, was 4.78 miles at our yearly Thanksgiving Day road race. Depending on my fitness level and stage of pregnancy or postpartum, my pace varies between a 11-minute mile to as slow as a 13-minute mile. That is SLOW. Barely a jog. And I'm nowhere near the point at which running 10+ miles feels like no big deal (yet). My running is all about burning calories, clearing my head, setting a few goals for myself, and having fun. Part of my motivation in sharing this race recap is to convince all of you that if I can run a half marathon, ANYONE can. If you have the desire and the time to train a little bit, you can totally do it. (That's not to say it will be easy or painless. It won't. But it's totally worth it.)
Be all that you can be, people.
Okay, end of speech and on to the morning of the race.
We wake up about 6:30 that morning. It's a cold, clear and sunny day. High temperatures are forecasted to be near 40 degrees.
From 6:30 to 8:30, life is a flurry of drinking coffee, putting corned beef in the crock pot, getting the girls changed, dressed (wearin' o' the green) and groomed, M making waffles and all of us scarfing down a few, and then locating our own running clothes and putting them on. Then we put the following items in the car: our packed lunches and snacks, the double stroller, the diaper bag, the girls' hats, coats, and mittens, and finally... our children. And ourselves.
M comments, when we're finally underway, that getting everybody ready to go was like a pre-marathon marathon.
The drive to race site takes us about 1.5 hours-- we arrive about 10 AM, 1 hour before the race starts. We navigate to the parking garage where we had planned to meet our friends Missy & Kirk. They're going to hang out with the girls while we run. We find them and get all of the necessary items packed into the stroller. M walks around the parking garage, searching for our friend who is running with us. He very kindly picked up our race packets for us the previous day. Eventually we find him and attach our race bibs from the packets with the safety pins provided. We go on a quest for port-a-potties.
We find some potties and get in line. We all wait in line together for about 30 minutes. It's quite chilly-- mid to upper 30's at this point. C is cold and getting hungry, so she fusses a little. We pass her around to get her calmed down, and eventually I get her to eat a few peanut butter crackers. I munch on a few of them myself.
After we all use the restroom, we have 10 minutes before the race starts. We take a quick pre-race picture (which you'll remember from this post) and then Missy takes C and urges us to make our way to the start line. Everything happens really quickly; I just hope I remembered everything the girls needed.
We get to the start line with about 5 minutes to spare. We have to enter the pack from the start line itself, and it's so crowded that we can't make it back past the 7-minute mile corral. I'm a bit afraid of getting trampled, but there isn't anything we can do about it.
Before I know it, they're giving the 10-second countdown, I'm high-fiving my husband and our friend, wishing them luck... and the gun (air horn, actually) goes off!
Thankfully, things widened out after the start line and I didn't get trampled. Yay! I let all of the 7, 8, 9, and 10-minute milers pass me, secretly hoping I might catch up and pass some of them in the last three miles. I can dream, right?
(This being my first half marathon, and a much more flat course than I'm used to, I'm nervous about going too fast in the first part of the race and burning myself out early. I take what feels like a conservative pace and hope to have "juice" left to pick things up at the end.)
Within the first half mile, I realize I've forgotten the little packet of granola I had brought for myself as a re-fuel. I left it in the stroller with the girls. (Most of the reading I've done recommends consuming some kind of fuel after an hour of continuous running. I'm finding this is imperative for me on longer runs.) At this point, I'm already feeling like my carbs-only waffle breakfast and 2 high-sugar Keebler peanut-butter crackers are not sticking with me.
There are supposed to be aid stations along the race route. I didn't read my instructions carefully enough to remember where or how many, but I'm thinking that surely somebody will have something for me to nibble on.
Be all that you can be, people.
 |
| Here I am struggling to the finish line (in the pouring rain) at my first Thanksgiving Day road race back in 2006. This distance felt like a marathon to me at the time, but I finished! Slow and steady wins the race. |
We wake up about 6:30 that morning. It's a cold, clear and sunny day. High temperatures are forecasted to be near 40 degrees.
From 6:30 to 8:30, life is a flurry of drinking coffee, putting corned beef in the crock pot, getting the girls changed, dressed (wearin' o' the green) and groomed, M making waffles and all of us scarfing down a few, and then locating our own running clothes and putting them on. Then we put the following items in the car: our packed lunches and snacks, the double stroller, the diaper bag, the girls' hats, coats, and mittens, and finally... our children. And ourselves.
M comments, when we're finally underway, that getting everybody ready to go was like a pre-marathon marathon.
The drive to race site takes us about 1.5 hours-- we arrive about 10 AM, 1 hour before the race starts. We navigate to the parking garage where we had planned to meet our friends Missy & Kirk. They're going to hang out with the girls while we run. We find them and get all of the necessary items packed into the stroller. M walks around the parking garage, searching for our friend who is running with us. He very kindly picked up our race packets for us the previous day. Eventually we find him and attach our race bibs from the packets with the safety pins provided. We go on a quest for port-a-potties.
We find some potties and get in line. We all wait in line together for about 30 minutes. It's quite chilly-- mid to upper 30's at this point. C is cold and getting hungry, so she fusses a little. We pass her around to get her calmed down, and eventually I get her to eat a few peanut butter crackers. I munch on a few of them myself.
After we all use the restroom, we have 10 minutes before the race starts. We take a quick pre-race picture (which you'll remember from this post) and then Missy takes C and urges us to make our way to the start line. Everything happens really quickly; I just hope I remembered everything the girls needed.
We get to the start line with about 5 minutes to spare. We have to enter the pack from the start line itself, and it's so crowded that we can't make it back past the 7-minute mile corral. I'm a bit afraid of getting trampled, but there isn't anything we can do about it.
Before I know it, they're giving the 10-second countdown, I'm high-fiving my husband and our friend, wishing them luck... and the gun (air horn, actually) goes off!
Thankfully, things widened out after the start line and I didn't get trampled. Yay! I let all of the 7, 8, 9, and 10-minute milers pass me, secretly hoping I might catch up and pass some of them in the last three miles. I can dream, right?
(This being my first half marathon, and a much more flat course than I'm used to, I'm nervous about going too fast in the first part of the race and burning myself out early. I take what feels like a conservative pace and hope to have "juice" left to pick things up at the end.)
Within the first half mile, I realize I've forgotten the little packet of granola I had brought for myself as a re-fuel. I left it in the stroller with the girls. (Most of the reading I've done recommends consuming some kind of fuel after an hour of continuous running. I'm finding this is imperative for me on longer runs.) At this point, I'm already feeling like my carbs-only waffle breakfast and 2 high-sugar Keebler peanut-butter crackers are not sticking with me.
There are supposed to be aid stations along the race route. I didn't read my instructions carefully enough to remember where or how many, but I'm thinking that surely somebody will have something for me to nibble on.
I run the first mile or so of the race at what feels like a very comfortable pace for me. The course is really flat so far, even slightly downhill. After a while I check my clock... about 18 minutes have passed. I haven't seen a mile marker yet. I figure I must be going pretty slow. But all of the sudden, I see the marker for mile 2! I pass the mile 2 marker just as the clock is switching to 20 minutes. I've just run two 10-minute miles... that's really fast for me! I'm thrilled that this pace feels pretty comfortable and I'm confident that I can probably keep it up for the rest of the race. If I do that, I will definitely exceed my unspoken time goal of completing the race in 2.5 hours or less.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet... I've still got 11 miles to go.
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