Had a great time pacing the 2 hour group at the Dino Half with Becky. This is the first time that we have paced together and it went very well. We work well together because she is a great cheerleader and I excel at being a task master.
It's a small race (200 racers) so pacing the 2 hour group gave us the best crowd. For the first half of the race we had about 10 runners around us including a 10 year old girl that was running her 4th half marathon. We also ran with Tara who we found out was friends with Don and Adrian who I have paced a few races with. The running world is such a small world. We started out a little ahead of our targeted pace because the first 2 miles are steeper downhill than we expected. We settled into a good pace and maintained a 30 second cushion for the first half of the race. To spice things up, they added a Sprintasaurus award for the fastest half mile from 6.2 to 6.7. As we approached it, we let our runners know that we were going to run it a little faster to help them push. We started out at a decent pace. I pushed a little harder to catch the runners ahead. Half way into it, I caught up to Tara and ran along side of her to help her push to the end. She ended up winning the Sprintasaurus Queen award. After that, we took a little walking break to get back on pace. The herd thinned out a little bit for the rest of the race. We had a guy that was recovering from injury and hadn't run in a month and another who was targeting us after starting 3 minutes after us because he was waiting in the POP line at the start. They both stuck with us until the last mile when we told them to push ahead. We were 20 seconds ahead of pace at the 12 mile mark so we backed off the pace and encouraged the last couple of runners that were around us. Crossed the finish line in 1:59:57. | 