Running the Race Before You

All you faithful followers of our blog have seen my last two efforts in running half marathons. This past Saturday, I had my third career half marathon, running our local race. In recent years, this race has blossomed in popularity. In 2007, there were a mere 700 runners signed up for the 13.1 mile race. Last year, I ran the course along with about 2,200 other people, and this year, the race was finally capped at 2,397. There just simply isn't any more room for all the runners. So I'm really glad that I got signed up early!

This course is mostly downhill. We start up in one of the local mountain canyons, and the first 7 miles are run down out of that canyon. Then we turn up into the populated area, running through a couple of neighborhoods toward the finish line, which is only about 5 miles from our house.

The race began at 7:00 AM. That meant an early morning for me to drive over, catch the school bus for the ride up to the start line, and then get ready. I found myself starting about 50 yards from the starting line. Fortunately, our race bibs had a chip on them which was activated when we crossed the start line, and timed out when we crossed the finish line.

Running down a mountain valley means limited photo opportunities, unlike in my last race earlier this summer. So Carrie had to wait at the finish line to get any pictures. Here, she catches me in action as I race toward the finish line.

Even though I had trained earlier in the summer, we had quite a few visitors over the summer, not to mention a couple of trips. That meant that I didn't get as many training runs in as I would have liked. I did set a personal record for myself, with a time of 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 4 seconds. But I can say that I was really pretty beat at the end of the race, if you can't tell from this picture.

Remember that we had to ride the bus up to the start line? Well, the temperature was really pretty chilly at the start line. I had shown up wearing a running jacket, not to mention such things as my car keys. I was hardly alone, as many other people had personal belongings that they wanted to keep close at hand. However, the race officials provided all of us with a bag to put our personal belongings in, and then we filled two busses full of them to take the bags back to the finish line. Here's what they all looked like near the finish line.

Once I had finished, I went into the area set aside for runners, where they had oranges, bananas, water, and gatorade. I made a few stops in there to get some liquids back into me after sweating them out most of the morning. Then, it was time to stretch out my muscles, so we found a nice little area where I could lay down on the ground and stretch out.

I should also mention that my time of 1:46:04 placed me at #251 overall in the race. That's not too bad- 251 out of 2,397. The winning runner ran the race in just over 1:05, which comes out to 12 MPH, or one mile every 5 minutes. My average was one mile every 8:08, an average of just under 7.5 MPH. Not quite Olympic material yet!

My next race is not a half marathon. We have a local full marathon that runs 4 weeks after the half. That same day, the race officials offer a 5K that same morning, which I will run instead. 3 miles instead of 13. I wonder what I'll do with all the extra energy!