Notes
The time is a little bit of a guess. Official was 19:47, but my guess is it took us 15ish seconds to cross the start line. Brendan and I started the race with Ashley, then wound our way through the crowd for the first half mile or so until we settled into a reasonable pace and passed people. I sorta chuckled as we came through the first mile in 6:55, seeing as that pace is slower than all of my runs recently. Because it makes no sense at all, they didn't have anybody reading out times at the 2 mile mark, so I don't know what our split was. Anyway, our avg pace for the final 2.1x was 6:04, and my guess is that we ran more like 6:20 pace then more like 5:40 for the last mile. We passed a lot of folks in the last couple miles, and Brendan hung onto the pace pretty well. I felt comfortable, but pretty dull, as would be expected from nearly zero running and taking days off. I was wary about kicking really hard, because I didn't want to put totally unnecessary stress, but Brendan thought the finish line was sooner than it actually was, so he started picking up the pace a bit earlier than I thought we would, and got into a really good clip the last 600m. As we rounded into the finish, he put in another burst of speed and I remembered that he has sub 2:00 800 times, so I though oh well, but I reeled him back in and edged him at the line. It was great to run a race all the way through with someone like that again. Brendan seemed to really enjoy it, and it'll be nice to have a friend with some good running ability around here to run with. I'm hoping, once I have a relatively consistent running schedule going again (if I can manage 4-5 days a week that would be great), to actually train with the idea of getting back into producing some decent times. Shouldn't be too difficult, seeing as I can apparently run acceptably on hardly any fitness level.
Good anecdote: as we were stuck behind folks at the beginning, I pointed past Brendan to someone dressed in a giant Santa hat costume and said really loudly, "man, we're losing to a huge hat!"