Race Recap: Boston Run to Remember Half Marathon

So, I haven't blogged in like a week. I just haven't had anything interesting to report. It was a boring running week since it was race week and the mileage was low. I felt like I ate way too much (there is a reason I don't buy gummy candy, because I will eat it everyday). Anyway, race recap...

We woke up at 4:15 and went through our typical race prep - coffee, oatmeal, dressed, out the door. We had to get on the train at 5:30 to get to the start. Our connection train was late, which put us getting to the start line at 6:45 for a 7:00 start. Yikes! The bathrooms were crammed into a little alley area on the side of the convention center, which created a huge bottleneck of people trying to get in and out. There were no lines, though, which was good - we were able to get back out to the start line and fight our way up to at least the 8:30 pace marker. By this point we're only a couple minutes from gun time. I start up my Garmin, and try to start up my music... but my headphones were dead. I furiously tried everything I could to get them to work to no avail - they were not going to work. I never run without music - I make dedicated playlists that I know will help keep me motivated and help me keep cadence.

The start was pretty crowded but I opted to run on the curb/sidewalk for the first 1.5 miles which helped me go faster, for sure. I was still angry about the music thing but I just let it go and resigned myself to running 13 miles with no music. The crowd finally thinned out around mile 4 and I didn't have to weave to get around people.

I kept checking my Garmin every 3 seconds and I was sort of baffled why a 7:55 pace felt so hard. My original goal was to run anything under a 1:45 - I really wanted an average pace that had a 7 as the first number. I sort of knew around the halfway point that probably wasn't going to happen. I was bored and tired of listening to myself huff and puff. Music definitely would have helped!

I decided around mile 9 to stop looking at my Garmin. I was stressing myself out and it wasn't worth it. My goal at that point became to keep running and finish as strong as I could. I was running right around a 8:00 mi/mile until then - miles 11 and 12 were at a 8:21 and 13 was 8:44. Oh well. It was pretty warm by that point and I didn't really care anymore - I was purposely going out of my way to give little kids high fives. Ha! I needed something to kill the boredom of running for that long.

Official time: 1:46:51, 8:10 avg pace 

This was less than a minute off my PR. Am I little disappointed? Maybe. But honestly, I'm okay with it.

Now to take a couple weeks of easy training! I will start marathon training in less than three weeks!

Somehow we only took one picture yesterday. Race picture fail!

And it was blurry. But at least I wasn't crying.