Half Marathon

I ran my first-ever race on November 1st.  I'm training for a marathon and wanted to see what a race was like so I decided a half would be good practice.  It was and I learned a lot of things that will and won't work for the marathon.  And most of all, I found out that races are a lot of fun ... and they make me push myself harder than I do in regular training runs.  Not sure if that is a good or bad thing.  But I knew my normal pace so before the race I decided that I would be happy with anything under 2 hours, 30 minutes and if I could get 2:15, I would be super-excited!

The first piece of advice anyone always gives you in a long race is to start slow so you don't wear yourself out and you'll have enough energy to finish strong. Well I knew this was true but I also didn't want to go too slow.  It was a race after all!  But I really had no choice but to go slow the first mile.  It's really crowded at the starting line and you have to kind of wait for the crowd to thin out and that took a good half mile.  So when I finished the first mile at a 10:36 pace I was a little nervous. But things picked up and everything went well.  Here are some pictures from the day.

I woke up at about 4am and drove over to my mom's house.  She took a picture of me with my bib number on.

Then my mom and stepdad drove me to the train station.  The train arrived at about 5:45am.

I got on way in South Dallas and had to go all the way through downtown so I was on the train awhile.  Got bored and took a picture of the timing chip in my shoe.  :)

Finally arrived at the train station and then got on a bus that took me to the race.  It was cold and I was worried that I would freeze during the race but once the sun came out it started warming up.  Lines for the port-o-potties were really long.  After I waited through that I looked around some of the vendor tents while I waited for racetime.

Finally it was time to head to the starting line.  The amount of people was pretty amazing.  And I stopped thinking about how cold I was.

Everything went well.  I ran the race and I finished a lot faster than I thought I could.  Probably a little too fast because I was really having trouble maintaining my pace the last 2 miles.  Was awful!  But here is my unofficial time (official time ended up being 3 seconds faster).

And after the race I walked over to see my family.  I was so glad they had come out!  After we left, we went to one of my favorite Mexican restaurants.  It was a good day!

And now I'm just ready to run my marathon this Sunday.  Seems like I've been training forever.  I went on my last training run this morning so no more running before the race.  Seems so weird!

And how about some running music.  Here is my absolute favorite song to run to.  Marilyn Manson: The Beautiful People.  (How strange that I have played MM two posts in a row.)