Race Report Fort DeSoto Beach Halfathon
Did the race with the intention of running about 5 beforehand and then using the half as a tempo and finishing up with 2 recovery miles. I had some bowel issues before the race, so that changed to about 2 miles beforehand followed by the half, followed by the final 5. So basically inverted.
The race:
My goal was to hold my placing (5th) for the money awards (hopefully) in the series or move up to another level. There were only 2 runners I could realistically catch and move up in the series: Sean and Chris Y. who were both a minute or so ahead of me in the series, so I just focused on those two during the race and the time between us. I thought the best thing to do would be to go out fast and see if they would bite into going too quickly early on. I knew I'd been putting in the miles, so I could hopefully hang on to a slower pace in the later miles and make up the ground. Well, funny thing- Sean is apparently in much better shape than I expected and I am in much worse shape than I thought so that was a hilarious joke as I watched him fly away at a 5:25 opening mile- in other words, I had no chance. However, Chris didn't partake after the first mile, so I think I made a good decision, as he ended up finishing over 3 minutes behind me. Fortunately, this means I earned 4th place in the series! This is relatively exciting considering I was not running 2 months ago- and when I did run I was making things worse.
In the end, I would rather just throw this race away and never think of it again, but it should provide a good starting point for my next marathon to at least maybe hit a respectable time.
Splits: 5:33, 5:51, 5:34, 5:39, 5:39, 5:53, 6:04, 5:59, 5:45, 5:49, 5:59, 6:19, 6:15, Finish (60 seconds-ish). My splits were ridiculous for this race, as you can tell.
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