Last week I ran my second half marathon this year (and ever for that matter.) I spent the last 12 weeks training for it. You can see all the preparation I put in my looking at my training blog. At times I wondered what I had gotten myself into. It's not only a commitment to exercise but that exercise takes a lot of time. To be honest I'm to the point that I like exercising. It only took a few decades!
After my last half marathon I was ready to take a break. That break didn't last very long though because I started seeing that my friends were going to do this one too. I hate to be left out so you know that I had to sign up too!
Friday evening I drove up to SLC for a carb-heavy dinner with some of my running mates. I stayed the night at my friend Ty's house since we were planning on leaving for the race shuttle at 4:40am. It was dark but not too cold. That is until we started going up the canyon. I was glad that I had brought fleece sweatpants and a jacket. They had provided us with gloves and space blankets. Good thing because it was freezing up there were we waited for about 30 minutes. They had drop bags for us to put our warm clothing in 10 minutes before the race started. I said goodbye to my jacket and fleece pants until the finish line.
As the race was about to start I moved forward with Curtis to the 1:30 pacer. I knew I wouldn't keep that pace but I like starting closer to the front. The race started and it was still pretty dark. So much for me mocking the people with headlamps. I'm glad there were a few around me so I could see something. After about 15 minutes it started to light up and at about 30 minutes I decided to ditch the gloves.
This race was all downhill and I wanted to make sure that I beat my time from the American Fork Canyon Half Marathon. Which was 1:56:02. I was actually nervous the most of the time that I wasn't going to beat it. As I kept track of the pacers it seemed that they were actually going faster than they were supposed to. I was also distracted by the fact that my stomach was not feeling very good. I think I had drank too much before the race and then I would still stop at each station and drink more. I finally realized that I was feeling worse each time after drinking. Then I decided to no longer stop. Also I had taken some Imodium before the run. I do that on long runs because I don't want any surprises. :) Well it didn't seem to be working very well but I wasn't about to stop for that especially in a port-a-potty. They always seemed busy anyway. TMI? Oh well.
I did end up beating my previous time by over 3 minutes. Here are my stats:
All: 244/643
All Males: 104/197
40-44 Males: 26/41
Chip Time: 1:52:48.5
Gun Time: 1:53:02.2
Pace: 8:36
