First race of the year! I was pretty worried about this race today considering a lack of training followed by this last good week of hard running. I also didn't know how the knee would hold out. Turns out it only hurt a bit during the race but I'm paying for it right now.
We stopped by Rob's to say Hi and of course my girls just wanted to stay with them for the night so Rob was awesome in taking them in for the night. I got up to the race early and changed my bib over to the half since the entry that they gave me last year was for the full. No way that I was going to run a full today even though the prediction was nobody wanted to run it. That turned out to be wrong since a great field showed up for the full too. I had a great time just being back into the running for the first 4 miles. 5:20, 5:27, 5:34, 5:28. It appeared that the leaders were doing under 5 for some of those miles. I was holding a pretty strong goal of running at sixes so I eased off a bit and just got in some miles. I was completely freezing by now, hands numb. I ran the last three miles at around 6:45 pace and was pretty happy that I felt no bad effects of jumping back into running again. Good run for me, now it's time to continue with some training.
One clear impression from racing today is how fast you actually have to go when you want to run a Half Marathon in 1:10-1:15. It's easy to forget when you are not training fast that you cannot race fast, or what kind of fitness it takes for that speed. My imagination is always faster than my fitness. One of the best things about running is that you have to walk the talk eventually.
It's cool to be out with guys that train so hard and run so well. Hats off to those guys who ran that course today under 1:10. It's certainly not as fast as the old half course was. | 