A Half Marathon - in the dark!

My chicken was impressed! :)

This week I kept it simple: 3 hilly, 5 trail, 4 hilly, and  then a half marathon Saturday night.

It is mid August and the temp was 67 degrees, windy and rainy! I ran this race last year and it was 85, sunny hot and humid - and they ran out of water the last third of the race! It was totally opposite this year and they had water at every mile!

The race started at 7pm. The rain had just stopped, the wind started to die down, and the temp was perfect. I got behind a 2:15 pacer and thought I'd try to stick it out. I did. Everything went smoothly and I kept a 10 minute pace - sometimes 9:30 sometimes 10:15 but in the end it averaged out to 10 min miles. I had a gel at mile 4 - grabbed some water and chugged it (about 20 seconds walking). Had another gel at 8.5 miles and grabbed some water and kept going. I grabbed some gatorade at mile 11 but didn't walk. At mile 12, I thanked the pacer and took off for the finish. I made it in 2:12. It was dark the last hour but I could see where I was going for the most part. It was nice to have packs of runners around me all the time. My ipod died at mile 4 so just hearing the footsteps of other runners was all I needed. :)

I'm really thinking it would be fun to train to break a 2 hour half. So that may be my short term goal for now. I'm having a hard time making time for long runs over 15 miles - life is so busy. So maybe I'll concentrate on that for now. I would like to run a marathon this winter so I'll try to plan for that as well. At least I feel like I've got the running bug again since I was really feeling a slump for the past month!