More running

It’s done! It’s over! I did the half-marathon in a 12:03/mile pace for a grand total of 2:37:58. That is only a minute and four seconds slower than I ran it last year and considering that I expected to be at least five minutes slower than last year, I am quite pleased.

This was a women’s only race. What that means operationally is that the lines for the bathrooms are quite long and that no matter where you are you hear people discussing food. Not vegetables, mind you–these people are discussing pasta and bread and cupcakes. It’s all about race prep and race prep is about carbs.

The start was tough because of the bathroom situation. At a race, you are supposed to line up at the flag that most accurately reflects your pace per mile. However, the bathroom lines were blocking where the 10 through 12s were supposed to line up which meant that R and I started the race with a lot of faster women and we were with them for a while. It was good to have a race buddy; I ran almost nine miles of this race with R, and though neither of us was in a particularly talkative mood it’s good to be in battle with someone else.

We ran the first couple of miles at a 12:30 pace, eventually moved to a 12:15 pace and then were doing a 12/mile pace in some later miles. AT the 11 mile mark I realized that I was doing a cumulative pace of 12:13/mile and I decided to try to get as close to a cumulative 12 as I could get. I believe that my pace for the last 2.1 miles was between 11:15 and 11:20 and though I didn’t get to an overall pace of 12/mile, I’m still pleased with my effort. It’s fun to pass people at the end, especially those misguided women who go out at a 10 minute mile pace and have to walk the second half of the race.

In the past three years I have run 17 races of 10 miles or longer. I am tired just thinking about it.

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