Overall finish – 431 (10,523 total)
Age Finish – 17th (305 total)
First of all I want to say I had a great day at the race! I went to the Expo Center on Saturday, the day before, and picked up my Bib and Packet. At the Expo I was able to meet up with Der Hammer, who lives in Austin. We have been communicating on the Blog and he has been giving me some great advice and encouragement. BTW…you need to check out his race report…He qualified for Boston…YES…!!! I couldn’t believe how much traffic and how many people were at the Expo and at the race on Sunday. I think there were about 20,000 runners in all (5,000 Marathoners, 10,500 Half Marathoners, and others in the several thousand in a variety of other races). It might have been fun to run with someone but what the heck…I was probably too self conscience about how I was going to do…probably better I was by myself.
At the beginning of the race I lined up at the very end of the “chute”. This was probably a bad decision because for the first three miles I felt like OJ Simpson running through the airport dodging people, jumping over strollers and just trying not to run over the back of someone. I really couldn’t get into a good stride until about the fourth mile. (Actually I later looked at the 5K times for all of the 17 runners that beat me; every one of them had a faster 5K pace than me… I was up to 5 minutes slower; most were 3 or 4 minutes faster than me. I did intend to go out slow but I think this was too slow. Even with this slow start and after 3 miles I realized my heart rate was 163, way higher than I wanted it at this point in the race so I decided to slow down on mile 4 to see if I could make it go down. After running mile 4 in 8:21 I decided my heart rate wasn’t going to go down unless I started walking so I just decided to run by pace and not worry about my heart rate, if I burned out then I burned out! I also think it was about this point in the race that I saw the BIG guy with no shirt, his I-pod strapped to the back of his shorts in front of me. Every time he took a stride about 6 inches of his crack showed…I decided I couldn’t take looking at that ugly sight so drastically picked up the pace to get in front of him and stay there! Around mile 5 or 6 two really hairy butted guys came running into the race group wearing only g-straps and tee shirts…at this point in the race I realized why they call Austin “WEIRD”…! Finally at mile 7 I decide to tune out all of the distractions and JUST RUN. On my 7th mile I broke the 7:00 pace and realized I was going to be able to finish the race…! On miles 8 and 9 I just cruised at what I felt was a comfortable pace. Since I wanted to finish strong, I decided to slow a little on mile 10 and ran it at 8:11. At the 11 mile spit (Full Marathon or Half Marathon) I joked with the race judge about which way I should go. He encouraged me to take the Full route but at the last minute I decided to go ahead with my Half plan…Ha Ha… Mile 12 was great…!!! They say it has the toughest hill of the course and I was looking forward to it. I think I passed about 20 runners on this hill and a total of about 50 from that point in the race until the end…No one passed me after the 11 mile mark…! This made me feel good. I was tired at the end but quickly recovered and today feel about like I do on any longer run day. Now I have a PR and a goal to beat in two weeks in San Marcos at another Half Marathon. That’s my race report and that’s all I have to say about that!
| Livestrong Half Marathon |
| 2/20/2011 |
|
| Mile |
Time |
Heart Rate |
|
| 1 |
8:02:00 |
150 |
Livestrong Half Marathon |
| 2 |
7:33:00 |
159 |
| 3 |
7:54:00 |
163 |
| 4 |
8:21:00 |
163 |
| 5 |
8:00:00 |
161 |
| 6 |
7:52:00 |
162 |
| 7 |
6:59:00 |
162 |
| 8 |
7:34:00 |
162 |
| 9 |
7:37:00 |
165 |
| 10 |
8:11:00 |
165 |
| 11 |
7:53:00 |
169 |
| 12 |
7:36:00 |
173 |
| 13 |
7:37:00 |
175 |
| 13.1 |
1:07:00 |
179 |
| Total |
102:16:00 |
165 |
|
| Pace |
7:48:24 |
|
|
1 Corinthians 9:24
"Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize."
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