Urban Bourbon Half Marathon

Went out with decent hopes today of getting a PR on this course. Didn’t have a great finishing time two years ago, had a decent finish last year, and considering all of my PR’s in 2014 I felt good about completing today’s 13.1, my 28th Half-Marathon in 10 years.

The weather was great at the start – 64 degrees and overcast with a small chance of rain. Unfortunately, I didn’t account for the humidity and instead of a tank top chose a t-shirt which made the race fairly warm just a few miles in. Luckily, it wasn’t long before a small sprinkle came along and cooled me off, so all was well on the course.

I started off with a 6:1 interval – something I haven’t done in a long time, and moved it down to a 4:1 just two miles in. The additional 2 minutes of running were a little much for me and the 4:1 was much more manageable. I felt great throughout most of the race, and was surprised to find myself running up the hills in the park rather than taking the walk breaks I had allowed for. Walking just takes that much longer, and as long as I kept at a slow and steady shuffle, I didn’t wear myself out much more than I would had I walked it.

Nine miles in I began to get more and more tired. This seems to be around the mile marker that I hit my wall in this distance race, but knowing that I’ve completed it so many times before, I trudged along and kept a slower, but still steady, pace. That is until about 10.5 miles in when I began to feel some tummy rumbles coming on. I seriously considered walking the last few miles, feeling that if I did much more than that I would be in some major GI trouble. I decided to do a new interval of running two blocks, walking one, which I kept up until mile 12. Considering the “finishing with a walk,” option came into my mind again, but left once more when I took that final turn back down Main Street with only 8 more blocks to go. At this point I was running just one block rather than two, anticipating the finish line just ahead.

As I crossed the line I heard the announcer call my name and felt so good to finally be done with this race. My official finishing time was 2:31:31 and, initially, I was kind of bummed about this time. However, after going over the finishing times of my prior half-marathon’s I’ve found that this is actually faster than my average of the past 10 years – good news. I guess I had been doing so well these past few years that I just anticipated that this would be at least a sub 2:25 race for me. But… I guess you can’t ALWAYS have a great race and I’m certainly not upset that I got out and completed more than what the majority of the City of Louisville did this morning.

Next order of business: Look into training plans for next year’s KDF mini as well as the Half Ironman races.