The Not-So-Daily Ramble

Yesterday, April 9, I ran my first half-marathon. Although realistically my goal should have been to just finish the run, I had a specific goal in mind: Run that sucker in less than two hours.  Never mind the fact that a) I had never run 13.1 miles before* and b) I didn't know if I could maintain a 9:10/mile pace for that long.**

The weather turned out to be just about perfect for a longer run: Cloudy and low 50s.  Three of my friends from work decided to waste a Saturday morning along with me. The race started at 8:30am and for the first mile it was the usual chaotic jostling around as the initial jam at the starting line moved along. After that, coworker John and I set off at a reasonably fast (for me, anyway) pace through the first four miles. We were averaging about 8:30/mile pace and I mentioned to him on mile 5 that "we may have made a tactical error here" in terms of our pace.   Right about that same time, the lead runners passed us heading back the other way (as the course was a loop).

As I got closer to the 9th mile, I was still hanging around 8:30-8:45/mile pace. I started to realize I was ahead of my two hour goal and at that point, I was hoping I would be able to hang on and not have some sort of colossal collapse in my remaining mile times.

At Mile 12, I was chanting to myself in my head "the faster you finish, the faster you can stop running" and "this is what you trained for" and all sorts of other things that normally I would ridicule were I not in the midst of a run.  I was definitely feeling it by then and was thinking to myself that I had no idea how people could actually run a full marathon (26.2 miles).

Once I could see the finish line, I started looking around for Angie and the boys. I saw them about 100 feet from the finish line and it really did mean a lot to me that they made it down to see the finish.  My finish time was 1:55:28.

With Sasha and Aiden.

With Angie at the finish line after the race.

Afterwards, the four of us from work commiserated briefly on the run and took a few pictures before we all headed off to clean up.

Mark, Kara, Scott & John at the Badgerland Striders South Shore Half-Marathon, April 9, 2011

Frankly, I'm amazed that I did as well as I had hoped I could. I know I owe a lot to Mark and John, who have run with me for the past two years and helped me get to this point.  Now the hard part: I am registered for another half-marathon later this year, but I'm not sure that I will be able to do any better than what happened yesterday.


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* - prior longest run was 12.0 two weeks ago

** - I hadn't managed that to date