Notes
Did this one as a longish run. My legs felt terrible (especially the back of my legs) from the bike ride yesterday. Guess I rode that a little too hard (for me). Oops. Honestly I wasn't expecting much from this anyway, because I am still struggling with my running speed. Nevertheless, it was a definite improvement over the Diva's fiasco months ago, and a good effort given my underrecovered state. Fitness comes back more slowly as we get older...BUT it does appear to come back. Yay.
So this race course was nice, albeit slightly hilly. The hills for the half didn't really start until mile 8 or so. Even though they were small rollers compared to my usual hills, because they were in the latter 3rd of the course they were pretty noticeable and provided a pretty hard pace hit. There was a Full Marathon and 10K also being contested, but there wasn't really any conflict that I noticed. The Full started 1/2 hour earlier and 10K 15 minutes later. This was a nice contrast to yesterday where they were running a kid's mile race right when the Bike Tour was finishing up. That was pretty chaotic and involved cyclists walking their bikes through the finish area so as not to hurt any youngsters. We were supposed to actually get an official time for the ride but who knows?
Water and Gatorade on the course was adequate. Because the weather was nice and cool, I didn't take in a whole lot of fluids. I took 1 Gatorade chewy square at mile 7.5 or so and water at two water stations.
Some of the roads were pretty slanted so that was a bit uncomfortable later on. The nice rural landscape complete with fields, cows and tree lined streets with pretty houses was a nice backdrop for running.
Running Addicts had pacers of all types out there for the Full and Half and they appeared to do a really good job at getting it done. Nice, small town race feel. Would do this again if it fit into a training schedule.
Funny that the race announcer asked who was going for a PR at the race start and only 1 person raised his hand. He asked who was doing their 1st half marathon and no one raised a hand. LOL. Clearly it was more a training race for most in attendance which was fine by me.
The race medals were nice, a bit on the generic side, but large. Since I did the Challenge (both bike and run) I got 3 medals, one each for the bike, run and challenge! My race t-shirt was a nice red technical shirt which I can actually run in. We were supposed to get a jersey on the tour but the supplier didn't have them ready so they are supposed to mail them. We were also supposed to get a pint glass but supplier problems prevented that from happening too. The finish area was pretty small but they had nice and tasty muffins and gave the runners bottled water at the finish.