Notes
I finished the half marathon. I have feelings about it. On one hand I’m disappointed. On the other I’m really happy. And on a borrowed hand I feel like absolute shit.
I have been averaging one race per year for the last few years. This distance hasn’t been tackled since 2014 so I only had a vague memory to go off of. The lack of sleep started to pop up while we were in Miller Park waiting for the race to start. Once I got to the corral I settled down and I was excited to get running. It was cold when stationary and there was a pretty good wind at our backs. At some point the wind would be in the front which concerned me.
When we went off there was a good separation so I didn’t have to dart around people. This is the benefit of starting in the A corral. However, I went out with the really fast people and since it was the beginning of the race and I was rested I went along. I realized halfway through the first mile and started to pull back on the throttle. My first two miles were showing a 6:50 pace. This was my initial expected pace but with the injury I knew it wasn’t tenable so I pulled back slightly. I know that in my official splits for the 5 mile I was holding a 6:59 pace which was right around where I wanted to finish considering the last 6 weeks and the foot injury.
Then things started to fall apart in small bits and it was a struggle to keep going. My pace slowed and pain started to make itself known. I accepted that and did what I had to do. It shows the 10 mile pace was 7:09 for the entire 10 miles. I knew at that point I could still break 1:35 but the PR was now in jeopardy.
After mile 10 I felt pretty good and ran a quicker mile 11. Mile 12 was awful with some abdominal issues and hills that seemed like mountains and was my slowest mile. However, Mile 13 looked like my fastest mile as I knew it was almost over and running around Miller Park is just really cool. After exiting Miller Park and making the turn I could see the finish. The seconds ticked on and I could see it cross 1:33:53 and my PR attempt was a bust. However, I booked it to beat 1:34 at least and my official time was 1:33:57. I’ll take it considering the issues the last 6 weeks and the difficulty in the course (that I conveniently forgot about!).
My stomach is still feeling really bad. My right shoulder is killing me which is a big surprise.
Now that this goal is done, it will be looking forward. I’m leaning towards starting over from scratch. Focusing on base building and strength training. My body barely held itself together for this and I have to build in a culture of taking care of the things outside of running.