I was looking over the official times and I am listed as 1:33:12- my Garmin shows 1:33:02 and usually I am off a second or two but usually on the high side not the low. Don't know for sure but this looks to be the gun time for the results not the chip time...could be wrong The timing crew did not get chip time started until 40 seconds after the gun went off-----this means I have no chip time just gun time. I am adjusting my official time to what I feel it should be at 1:32:59. I know I started my Garmin a bit early because of the congestion at the start, I hit the watch and then had to stand still for a few seconds before moving past the mat, didn't care because it was to be chip timed...... I also hit my watch a second or two after passing the finish line so dropping 3 seconds off my Garmin is what I feel is fair.
Okay, now that I am home I can jot down a few thoughts about the race. First of all I loved the course! The only thing that would have made it better would have been to have it 3 miles shorter but count it as a half marathon....j/k
After 2 nights without sleep I knew I was going to have some issues on this race. I drove up from St. George Friday afternoon on my way up to Ogden. My daughter Hilary was in labor and all the way up I am hoping for news of the birth. The longer it went the more concerned I became. She had been in the hospital since noon on Thursday. As I got to Utah Valley I had pretty much decided that the race was not going to happen for me. I decided to at least go pick up my shirt on the way by American Fork. As I walked up to the tent the call came! Happy day, my first grandchild. Since it had been such a long process everyone was so tired so I stayed for the race. The course is awesome, the kind I love- downhill and lots of it. I started out trying to keep things slow- weaving in and out of the slow runners was a joy and when I hit mile 1 I was at 6:38, feeling pretty good since it was a slow start and the water that I had to jump, splish, splash through. Mile 2 was the same 6:38, Now as I was getting to mile 3 I had to take a pit stop lost some time but I had to go, 7:10 on that mile so I lost time but didn't feel too bad. Mile 4 I picked up where I left off with 6:44 then it gets crazy. I don't know what got in to me but the next 3 miles were fast (for me). 6:13, 6:08, 6:07 I would look down at my Garmin and see times of 6:03 or 5:52 etc. and couldn't believe my eyes. Mile 7 was 7:00 and this is where I started to slow down and get tired. my splits to the finish are 7:46, 7:44, 8:12, 7:22, 8:06 and 7:21 for the final .10. I started taking walk breaks of 15-30 seconds, mentally I was very weak and really just tried to keep runners in sight that I had been seeing all the way down the course. They started to tire as well so we would then go back and forth the rest of the way taking breaks. I feel bad again that I didn't hold things together on a race when I was running great and would have destroyed my PR but didn't have enough fight in me to finish strong. I can also see from some of my splits that I have the ability to turn the legs over for an old (word removed by admin/ wasn't a swear word but starts with an 'f' and ends with a 't' with an 'ar' between) but just don't have the stamina that I need or the mental toughness to match up. Again, I know that had I been running with someone I could have gutted it up and dropped several minutes off my time. It's all good and I am excited about the race. I want to run this one again when I haven't just ran a marathon, 5k and 10k in the last 2 weeks and had been sick for those same 2 weeks following the marathon. Now that I have downloaded my Garmin I am sick! I broke down the times that I stopped and walked, bathroom break etc and was blown away with how bad I blew this race. I estimated very conservatively that I was walking for approx 7 1/2 minutes. Some of that was aid stations but that is minimal....bathroom was 40 seconds but needed to happen. It is the last 4-5 miles that ticks me off........no excuse for myself on this total mental lapse! This was my race to break under 1:30 and I was too weak mentally to push through being tired.
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