Too sore from crossfit to race the Parowan Half today, so I sat this one out and gave Cathy the support this time. I planned to run up the race course until I found Cathy. This was an all downhill race course, and as you can guess, half of it was uphill for me.
I ran up Parowan Cyn when the buses left for the start line. I missed the first left turn and headed up parowan canyon to the next left hand cyn. That canyon was so beautiful with a babbling brook next to me. I went 3 miles up the cyn until I realized I was in the wrong place. It was so cold that I could see my breath. So I reset my GPS and started running back to find the race course that Cathy and other friends were running on.
I finally found the turn off to yankee meadow and the racers had not come through yet... yipee!! I got to climb up another canyon!! I was almost 2 miles up the cyn and said hello to the first 14 runners and Breanna was the next runner yelling at me to turn around and ordering me to pace her to the finish. I agreed thinking that the finish was only 4 miles away. Oppps!!! I was off by 4 miles, but good thing I didn't know that because I may have refused to run that much further. I had already ran 9miles by this point.
I ran hard too, and poor Breanna kept up!! I had her running a 7:00 pace. She scolded me after the race for running so fast, but she did PR with a 1:34. And cathy was a few minutes behind her with an awesome time of 1:39 for her new PR. 9 minutes faster than her last PR 3 weeks ago at the Bryce Half. I ended up running 16 miles total (7:40 ave pace) and feeling pretty good for it. | 