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Notes

Pettit Indoor Half Marathon!

Aim for 1:42-1:43 laps

Ow, my feet hotspotted pretty bad. Counterpoint, holy s***, that's a 1:50 PR in the half marathon in less than a year!! More to come.

Splits are a little different than the official race time, which is odd. Either way, I will take this race every single day. Won the second heat by a comfortable 4:20 (blazin'!) and got a trophy for the effort!

Here's a more detailed race report, which has a bunch of random notes and thoughts - the short version is "woo victory and PR!"

Fueling: Nothing during the race - two cups of coffee, cookies and cream pop-tarts, and a double handful of frosted flakes around 7. For a race at 9:30, that was pretty much perfect - I would have eaten a granola bar around 9, but I forgot it. That was pretty much perfect for me, so let's just keep doing that.

Pre-Race: I woke up around 5:45 for breakfast; we drove to the Pettit Center leaving Madison at 7:30. I did miss the exit on the first pass, so we did get there a little later than planned, but still plenty of time before the race. The race shirt looks pretty good too!

Race: I started on the line and took the lead through the finish line for the first lap. (Note - the race is 47.5 laps, so you cross the finish line 48 times). There was a pack of three of us at the first lap, but third place dropped off pretty quickly and second passed me at about one lap in. I dropped in behind the leader and just hung with him for the next 7 laps. On lap 9, I realized he was slowing down a bit, so I made a hard pass and threw a bit of an early surge to try to push hard to get back on pace. That worked very well and I had the lead from there on out. (I lapped second at lap 28 and again at lap 46).

At lap 16, I realized that I was in a very good spot - 4.3 miles in 26:23 is very strong, even if that's a little deceptive because the first lap is only a half lap. At this point, I was feeling out where the line of effort would be - as it turned out, I found the line. At the halfway point, they announced that I was in the lead and folks in the race started cheering me on. That was really cool - there were two women who were very hyped, so I really enjoyed that. Around this point, my feet were starting to hotspot on the balls of my feet, so that was starting to get unpleasant.

Laps 35 to 43 were kind of rough - I started messing with my stride to take some pressure off, which helped a bit. At five laps to go, I started ramping the effort back into the maximum range. Two laps to go was pretty much flat out, even though I had some extra juice for that last lap. The finish is a little weird - you have to cross the track to finish on the outside, so there's a few extra steps and I was not thrilled with that. Happily, there was a bench where I could sit for a few minutes with some water.

Stats: Fastest Lap - 1:36.85 (final lap!!); 1:41.24 (lap 9, making the pass for the lead)

Slowest Lap: 1:46.79 (lap 41); 1:46.4 (lap 43); 1:46.33 (lap 2)

Biggest Delta: Lap 2->3; Lap 47->48

6th overall of the half marathoners out of 102 starters; 1st of 55ish in the second wave race.

Gear: Odlo shorts, Team Rocket Singlet, Zulu socks. It worked pretty dang well except for the hotspotting - I think the shoes just need a bit more break-in to feel really good.

This was a very, very good race. Reasonably well-executed and definitely a full swing, if not a full send. I can't complain at all about this.