This was by far the most fun I have had running since I started 10 years ago. Granted, I took 5 years off and the rest of my runs were mainly training for St. George. Regardless, this is a really fun course and a really fun race. Despite the fun, I thought today would be easier than it was. The elevation chart on the website shows the 1/2 gaining just under 900' on the steepest section, so I figured that the rest of the up and down would amount to closer to 1500' than the 2,111' that the course ended up throwing at me. The first 4ish miles were all uphill, which was challenging but not too difficult. The grade was pretty mild the whole way. And once we made it to the top, the down hill on the other side was as much fun as a roller coaster. The downhill was mostly slick rock and with several huge bounds I made short work of the decent. That brought me to a dirt road that was mostly sand. Running in sand is nice on the feet, but tough on the leg muscles. The dirt road continued for about a mile and then we were back to slick rock and several stream jumps before the aid station. After the aid station the trail ascended the mountain again and followed the edge of a gorge carved by the river I had just jumped over. Several places along this section of the run I - and everyone else - had to stop to lower myself off of one rock and onto another rock so I could continue down the trail. The run continued in this fashion until about mile 9.5 where the fun trail terminated at another dirt road. We followed the dirt road for about a mile and half and then turned down into the Kane Creek Wash. At this point, mile 11, the race crew instructed us that the trail dived directly into the river running at the bottom of the wash. I don't know if you have ever tried to run with ice cubes for feet, but that was what the next 2.1 miles amounted to. Nevertheless, it was a ton of fun to run (or wade) down the river to the finish line. I planned on this race taking me 2 1/2 hours, which it did, but for some reason I the math wasn't working in my head this morning when I told my support team what time to be at the finish line. I told them to be there at noon and I was done at 11:30. I spent a cold 30 minutes waiting for them to arrive. Something that occurred to me doing this today is that race times are really not that important. That's not to say they aren't a good measure of your progress but rather that one race time is not equivalent with any other race time. differences in courses, terrain, types of races, etc make my road 1/2 marathon time meaningless in relation to my time today or what I could or should have expected my time to be. As it works out, I figured this out before I got here, but I thought maybe it would be useful to pass along as well. So now, I have a PR for a trial 1/2 marathon. Next year maybe I can get that time down around 2:15:00. | 