Whoo hoo! My friend Martha and I did it! Cheffy's right - what a great feeling! Before I go any further, I want to thank those of you who said we should check out the course ahead of time. If we had just gone on the word of the people at registration ("Oh, no, it's not a hilly course."), we would have been in big trouble! But since we did 12 miles ahead of time, and drove the last part, we knew what to expect. It actually seemed LESS hilly to me this time - I think I had built it up in my mind as being worse than it was. Summary: Maine Coast HM, York, Maine Weather: Sunny. 54F at start, 70F at end. Warmer than we expected, but OK with the cool breeze off the ocean. Wardrobe: Pink Nike "Human Race" shirt I got on sale, steel blue shorts (not sure what brand), Underarmour cap (black, so not color coordinated, but that's tough), Asics GT-2130 shoes, wicking socks, BodyGlide, Blister Shield Powder. It all worked great - no chafing or blisters! Race strategy: Run 1 minute / walk 1 minute, and repeat over and over and over... Original non-stop running goal time, before I got injured: 2:30 Revised goal time, based on run/walk practice session: 2:42 Actual time (they had a start mat and a finish mat, hooray, so my official time matched my Garmin time!): 2:31:36. Race stuff: Cool purple and white, short-sleeved tech shirt with a lighthouse on the front. On the back, it says, "All Women, and One Lucky Guy" (a 50-something man who got in through a lottery - I saw him afterwards, and he said he finished in 1:59:03). A great medal with a lighthouse on it, hanging from a purple and white ribbon - hmm, women must have been in charge, if they worried about coordinating the ribbon with the shirt color! My day got off to a rough start. I knew our car's tire had a slow leak, but DH thought it would be OK for the weekend (before he left town with our other car!!). But I thought I should doublecheck, and sure enough, it was flat as a pancake! Arghh! I didn't think Martha would be ready in time to drive north 30 minutes to pick me up and then go south for almost an hour and a half. So I opened the phone book and picked a taxi company at random. We live in the boonies, so I didn't know if it would work. But they were GREAT (ASAP Taxi Company, for you Mainers). They actually spoke English and showed up in about 20 minutes. Frank was a great driver and heard more about running than he probably wanted to know! He said, "You seem so happy!" It was cool. I got to Martha's house at just the right time. Before I left the house, I thought I should glance at my list of stuff to take, although I was sure I hadn't forgotten anything. Uh, "Garmin" was written at the top of my list, and I definitely would have forgotten it if I hadn't made out the list last night. Yikes, where was my head? I felt like I'd had about 20 Cokes to drink, I was so hyper. We got to York High School shortly after 8 am, and the race was scheduled for 9. It still felt chilly, so we looked at the vendors' displays for a little while, and then went outside to watch the HM walkers start. Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, spoke for a minute and then started their race. Martha and I then warmed up for half a mile. I never thought I'd be running any BEFORE doing a HM! It felt good, so I was encouraged. No twinges from my arch or ankle. We started out at the back of the pack, since we were planning on walking some. Of course, that meant we were kind of boxed in, and running at our faster interval pace was tricky. We decided to run three minutes straight at the start because of the flow of the race. Then we settled in for our 1 min/1 min ratio. Martha had to reign me in, I was so pumped up! I really liked using the Galloway method. The group of women we were in were mostly running non-stop (except towards the end, when they were tired). Even so, our overall pace matched theirs pretty well. We played leapfrog the entire way with them. We tried to be considerate and get out of their way when we walked. It was hard some of the time, though, because the course wasn't closed, and we were dealing with Sunday drivers, tourists, and bicyclists! One pickup truck with high school girls came screaming by us on a residential street, so Martha and I yelled, "SLOW DOWN!" at them. Our splits were 10:51, 10:53, 10:38, 11:07, 11:04, 11:04, 11:07, 11:28, 11:47, 11:27, 11:53, 12:10, and 12:41. I'm happy with that, because we just tried to run our fastest and not worry about whether we were speeding up or slowing down. Our overall pace turned out to be 11:35, which was great! My 12-mile pace last week was 12:27. I checked my log, and my longest run before I got injured, 11.5 miles non-stop, was 11:21! I felt great until about mile 12, and then my calves started talking to me a little. But they held up OK, and we made it to the end, together. They thoughtfully had chairs just beyond the finish line, so I slumped into one and a nice girl who runs for York High School took off my chip. They'd already run out of pizza by the time we finshed, so we just had a banana. Pizza sounded good, so I just called Domino's to get some delivered to our house! I will also be making myself a gin and tonic shortly. So our first HM was a wonderful experience, and I look forward to doing another one and improving on my time. THANKS AGAIN to all you great RA folks. You've made it a fun, fairly painless adventure!

Way to go!! Congratulations! seems like you had a great time!

Thanks! Eric, the guy you know that ran the race seems really nice. He had to be a good sport to run with that many women! I saw one other guy running it - a funny way to bandit a race!!

Erin and I spoke with him after the race. He didn't even remember entering the lottery this year (he did last year.) His wife had just had a double masectomy a few months ago, and he didn't know he was running it until a few weeks ago so they didn't have a lot of time to prepare. I don't know if she finished; his son was out looking for her to see where she was at and whether it was worth her continuing if she wasn't doing so well at that point.

Erin's race report: http://news.runtowin.com/2008/09/21/maine-coast-half-marathon-review-2008.html Finish line photos: http://flickr.com/photos/runtowin/sets/72157607422319599/ (Sorry no photos of you Teresa...I was basically practicing on the early runners to get used to the 8 inch cone I was using as a tripod, and once Erin finished I went to see how she was doing and didn't get back to using the camera much. And obviously I didn't carry the camera around the course when I was clapping for everybody.)

That's a great race review!

Mind leaving a comment on the review? I'm getting a lot of people responding, but most of them are assuming that everything Erin wrote was critical and doesn't agree with what she says so I figure let's keep it going and keep people commenting! Heheh.

Done! I wrote a novel, lol.

Thanks!