So Sunday I ran the US Half Marathon through the nicest parts of San Francisco and inadvertently participated in a wet t-shirt flash mob. After weeks of sunny days, mother nature decided to rain exactly during my half marathon. It was 13.1 miles of pouring rain. The course itself was great because it was a longer version of the Presidio 10 I did this spring. There's always a rush you get out of running across the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, if I had windshield wipers on my glasses I would have gotten that rush, otherwise I could only see about ten feet in front of me. The rain was a pain in the ass in other ways as well. It added another five pounds of weight on me both in the form of wet clothes and wet shoes. The clothes got bad in mile 10 when my shorts began to slide off me and I had to periodically pull them up. And whenever I would step into a puddle, my shoes would get waterlogged. Oh, and at mile 4, my iPod gave out so I just running with no tunes.
On the plus side, I didn't have have problems with overheating or getting thirsty. And surprisingly, I has plenty of kick for the end. I am surprised I didn't just cramp up with being wet and cold but I didn't.
Being a wet, sodden mess, I was happy to just finish the race. In the end, I did just fine. I finished in 2 hours, 9 minutes and 59 seconds for a pace of 9:56/mile. That placed me firmly in the middle of the pack - 1292 out of 2976 runners and 316 out of 499 male runners between the ages of 30-39.
Three days later, I'm feeling pain free and am looking forward to running a 10K with my family on Thanksgiving Day.
Checking in / On the road...
12 years ago
3 comments:
Congratulations! Glad to hear that you felt strong towards the end. I really like the half-marathon distance. It's far enough that you feel like you accomplished something but not so far that you can't walk for a week afterwards. Are you going to try again at the half or move to the full?
I'm conflicted. I definitely want to have another half marathon under my belt before I do a full. But I'm don't know if I want to do a full. I mean where do you find the time to do a five hour training run?
In marathon training, my understanding is that your longest run is on the order of 20-22 miles or about three hours, and that you only do a couple of those. That's actually another reason why I like half's -- your longest training runs are 1 hour 45 minutes and under.
On the other hand, the bad thing about a half-marathon is that if you are committed to running it fast, a large portion of it hurts a lot.
Post a Comment