Run The Bluegrass Half Marathon

Wow - what a night. The Kentucky Wildcats made it to the Final Four, and since Alicia and I had a race in Lexington this morning, we decided to head down yesterday afternoon to catch the action at one of the local restaurants. We firmly planted ourselves at a pizza joint at 4:30 p.m. and commenced to drinking and carbing up for our run. Alicia, bad influence that she is, talked me into three pitchers of beer and three shots of Jager-bomb. This is less-than-stellar pre-race nutrition, by the way. When the game ended at 11:30 or so - the Cats lost :( - Alicia and I headed back to the hotel to try and get a good 7 hours of shut-eye before the race.

Because my motivation has been horrible these past few weeks, and because I copped out on doing a 10-mile race along with a scheduled triathlon the day after, I was determined to run this half marathon - hangover or not! I slept horribly (almost always do after a night of that much drinking), and woke up trying to figure out if how bad I was going to feel running the race, was as bad as how I would feel if I - once again - threw in the towel (I also have to add here that many of Alicia's family and friends had bets on whether or not we would do the race after a night like they all knew we would have). Wanting to prove them all wrong, we promptly got out of bed and got dressed to drive to the start line.

It was a great day for a race. Sunny, about 40 degrees starting off (although feeling warmer), with a slight breeze. It took me about two miles or so into the race before I decided that I would not, after all, be tossing my cookies from the prior evenings events, and got into a good little groove. About 7 miles or so in I started to feel a little pain in my left knee. This had happened in previous races/runs as well, so I wasn't too terribly concerned, but it got worse as the race went on and the last few miles were little more than a scurried jog to the finish line.

Alicia had stayed with me until Mile 11, but her foot was bothering her, and she said it felt better to run at a faster pace, so she went ahead - which I didn't mind at all, of course. Coming down the finishers shoot, she cheered me on at the sidelines as I made my way to the finish line. I had an unofficial finishing time of 2:37, which is 11 minutes faster than my Miami time from two months ago. Can't complain about that - especially since, after all those drinks, I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to run the race!

Flying Pig is in a month, and the only thing I'm concerned about is the fact that Alicia and I have also signed up for the Derby Half Marathon to take place the day prior. We both promised to take it easy on that one, but it'll be hard to do. We completed an 18 mile training run two weeks ago, and survived. But because we ran on sidewalks rather than asphalt, my calves, knees and quads were killing me by mile 13. We plan a 20 miler next weekend and are going to look for a route that we can run on nothing but streets. I'm also gonna have to break out the ol' knee brace to see if that will help this pain. There's no way I could finish "The Pig" after the Derby half if I'm feeling this way.