Half Marathon Report

I should have written this right after the race, but I was busy with school type stuff so it had to wait for Spring Break (WOOHOO). By The Way expect lots more entries in the summer when I am not in school and just trying to juggle a job (fingers crossed a pharmacy internship) and a pregnant wife.

So the Donna Half Marathon we were training for was held on the 21st of February. Caroline had to stop training for medical reasons which are obvious now, but at the time were mystifying to the other people training. I had done all the group training runs properly using the Galloway walk-run technique. My group was running four minutes and walking one minute. Two weeks before the race I had run fourteen miles in 2:01 so my goal for the actual half-marathon was to run under two hours. I had not been running the twice weekly sessions at home because it was so cold.

The morning of the race I drove to the parking garage and caught the shuttle. We drove out to the start line and when I got off the bus I just followed the crowd towards the “Runners Village”. It was a bunch of vendors tents which I was not interested in. I heard a guy calling groups of numbers by their colour and I realized he was almost at my colour (I think it was light blue-just checked the website fotos and I am correct). I joined that group of people and we were soon led out to the start line. I think one more group was put in front of us then the elite runners. I was freezing which didn’t help and they had to play the national anthem and talk about how great it was that we were all out there.

The race finally started and I followed the Galloway advice of not running too fast to start off. I got to one mile in about 10 minutes and started my timer. I proceeded to run/walk for the rest of the way along JTB. When we got to the beach and the roads narrowed I had trouble hearing my timer so I had to switch it to my wrist so that I didn’t spend 3 minutes walking like I did at one point. The supporters on the edges of the road were everywhere and I really didn’t like it. By the time I got to run on the actual beach I was worrying about the time I was taking but continued with the run/walk system that I had trained with. By the time we got back to JTB I was very tired and getting increasingly concerned about my time. I latched onto a runner going past me and followed him for the last 2 miles with no walk breaks managing to sneak in under the 2 hour limit I had set for myself.

I am glad I did the race and now I can say that I have done a half marathon but at the same time I was not happy with the time and how I felt throughout the race. Caroline tried to convince me that the reason I didn’t feel good was because I had stopped with the training runs during the week and that may well have been the case, but I did run the Gate River Run three weeks later (running the whole way) with no ill effects and no sore legs the next day?