After weeks of training in the summer heat, October 1st arrived bringing 60 degree temps. It was perfect running weather. I really think summer training helped for the day of the run, even though some of those hot training runs were not my favorite runs ever. Training on Saturday mornings became something I really looked forward to. It was nice having training partners to get up and meet and helped me stay on track with the long runs. We would switch it up and sometimes meet at the trail and other times meet at the track. I really enjoyed the training overall for this race.
I always said I wouldn’t do a half marathon in Columbia because of the hills. I’m glad I didn’t stick to that. Turns out the hills aren’t a bad thing at all. This was my best half yet. I was better prepared going into it but I think overall a flat 13.1 miles doesn’t give me any momentum where as some of the downhills that come with the uphills gave me some speed. I had a 10 minute mile pace for this race. My last half I completed in Chicago was a flat course and was a 12:30 pace. I was very happy with the improvement since then. I was also thrilled to be able to walk normally within a day of this race. One thing I did was foam rolled throughout training. My IT band still caused some knee pain here and there but not nearly like I have had in the past and it wasn’t nearly as bad of lingering after the run was over. By Monday morning I was feeling really great.
Glenda and I met up at 6:30 and walked to the start line. It was a bit of an anti-climactic start. No pacers…which actually was probably a good thing. I would have underestimated myself. Just a quick countdown of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go…and we were off! The first big hill came at mile 2. I thought for sure this hill would kick my butt but I started running it and just kept going and going. I was feeling good. It was about a half mile uphill and I walked about .10 of it. Then it was .5 downhill and that was, of course, awesome. I love downhill. After about three miles or so we hit the trail and ran the next 7ish miles on the trail. This actually became kind of difficult at some points since it was just so flat…even though I had done all my long runs on the trail. About mile 6 my knee started hurting but I tried to ignore it. We ran around parts of town I had never ran before so that was fun although I really had no idea where I was. I knew the next big hill was at mile 9 so when I was tempted to walk I told myself I had to get to the hill at mile 9. I’ve ran up this hill before but not ever after 9 miles.
One of the best parts of this race was the spectators. Our names were printed on our bibs and there were a lot of spectators out cheering us on. They would look at our bibs and actually cheer us on by name. That is a real pick me up. A lot of times the cheering would happen to come at just the times when I wanted to walk and when I heard my name it really helped keep me going. I did walk up a lot of the hill at mile 9 and realized that walking actually hurt my knee more than running through the pain did. The rest of the race was mostly uneventful…just fighting through the fatigue of tired legs. The last mile is usually something I can talk myself into running with “you’ve made it this far, less than a mile left” but my legs were exhausted so I walked a bit more of that last mile than I wanted to. But when I heard the cheers towards the end and saw the finish line I perked up and managed to find that last bit of energy. I was especially excited to see 2:11 on the time clock. My goal was to finish under 2:30. I was thrilled with this finish time.
Glenda finished a bit after I did and announced she didn’t enjoy the course as much as I did. I reminded her this was all her idea and then I said "This was so fun! Wait, when did I ever think a day would come that I would say running 13.1 miles on a Saturday morning was fun?" Times do change. We then enjoyed our BBQ sandwiches, Glenda enjoyed her beer and mine, and then we proceeded to walk slowly back to the cars. Uphill.
Pictures from the race:
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