Two halves equal a whole?

I ran my second half-marathon on Sunday.  It’s the same one I ran last year, the City of Oaks half-marathon through downtown Raleigh then down Hillsborough Street and back to the Bell Tower. 

I had my usual breakfast of champions: cold leftover pizza.  This was a white pizza with mushrooms from Daniel’s.  {I only ate two pieces, not all four that were in the box that morning.}

This is what 5:40 a.m. looks like.  It ain’t pretty.  {See Tori down at the bottom hoping to snag a bite of pizza?}

Okay, the race.  I started off really strong.  I felt good.  The worst part was how cold my hands were, which was an especially a bad thing when my left shoe came untied and I had to tie it with numb and uncooperative fingers.  I hit the 6-mile mark after 50 minutes and mile 8 came much quicker than I anticipated.  Yup, things were going swimmingly, unlike last year when my IT band got mad at me and protested painfully for the remainder of the race.

Apparently I not only counted my chickens before they hatched, but I sold them and cashed the check because I was thinking, “Five more miles to go, I can do that in my sleep!”

Then I dropped my basket of eggs and they all broke.  Coming up on mile 10, both my calves through the backs of my knees got super tight and crampy.  I made it almost to the turnaround point on Blue Ridge Road and I just had to walk.  I gave myself a minute then picked up the pace.  Unfortunately, my calves still hurt and the blisters on my feet were screaming.  I traded off walking and running, then finally stopped and stretched my calves against the metal pole of a sign.  That helped, but I’m afraid it was too late because the relief was momentary; it was back as soon as I started jogging again.

The discomfort was so bad that I could see the finish line and still had to stop and stretch my calves in order to at least jog across the finish line.  Otherwise, I was going to be walking if I was lucky and crawling if I wasn’t.

So my official time was 1 hour 58 minutes-ish.  I say “ish” because I think the timers were off a bit on this race.  If you look at the race results, I finished in just over an hour and fifty-nine minutes.  The split for the 10k shows I crossed that line in 54 minutes, but I saw the timer and it said 52 minutes, and I didn’t even GET to the start line until two minutes after the gun time.  So, yeah. 1 hour and 58 minutes-ish.

So of course I’m proud that I finished this race.  But I’m disappointed that I didn’t do better.  My goal was 1 hour 50 minutes, but a small part of me really thought I could do it in an hour and 45 minutes.  Finishing in that time would’ve put me in the top 15 of my age group.  Instead I was 40th (out of 170).

But enough about me.  There were about 3,500 other runners out there on Sunday.  Leigh ran the 10k, and Jari, Logan, Anna, and her coworker, Brian, all ran the half-marathon.

We ran into Jari as she was coming out of the beer garden.  Here’s the whole gang.

I would like to run one more half-marathon, but the next one needs to be somewhere flat, or at least less hilly that this one whose topography is apparently similar to the Boston Marathon, which YOU HAVE TO QUALIFY FOR.  Yeah, not just anyone can show up and run that thing because it’s an elite race run on a challenging course, and they don’t want any old Joe and Flo Schmo taking up precious space out there.

So that’s all from this definitely-not-Flo-Jo Flo for now.  I’m going to go back to stretching my sore calves and work up the energy to walk the dogs.  Between the aching legs and the time change, I’m not feeling too motivated to stray very far from the comfy couch and my warm laptop.

{Oh yeah, I can’t forget to give a shout-out to my number-one fan.  The McHusband got up just before 7:00 so he could get out to the race and see me finish.  Thank you, McHusband, for being there for me.}