I finished Seabrook Half Marathon #2 this morning in a VERY unofficial 2:29. I say “very unofficial” because I suck at using my Garmin and at mile 1, I accidentally pressed stop instead of lap. I realized it before mile 2 and restarted things, but for the rest of the run I remembered to press the lap button, oh, maybe half the time. My splits are so funky that I won’t even bother posting them, but until official results are available I can say that as far as I can tell from an reconstructed route/time in SportTracks, I finished just under 2:30. That’s an average of just under 11:30/mile — only 45 seconds per mile slower than yesterday despite more than twice as much walking.
I’m thrilled with that, and I finally feel like I can say: I’m ready. Yes, I’m ready for the Half Ironman!
I ran almost the entire first loop with Christy and some of her Houston Fit friends. We started out in a 5/1 run/walk pattern and stuck to it — in fact, I stuck to it even after I decided to pick up the pace a bit. When I hit 6 miles and was still feeling surprisingly energetic, I started running a little faster. My last few miles were at sub-11:00 pace…the last miles. How awesome is that?!
No major problems. I slathered bodyglide all over my feet to prevent the slight blister I got yesterday from growing, and that worked well. My shins actually hurt more yesterday than today. And the lower back pain of yesterday didn’t reappear. Overall, my body didn’t feel any worse than yesterday — I just didn’t feel quite as energetic. I was just tired, not sore.
(Photo from Joe)
Oh! And I think the course may have indeed been long. Garmin measured 13.3 yesterday and my reconstruction today in SportTracks read 13.27. (Interestingly, Garmin appeared to do better yesterday in the cloudless sky; today there were a few more spots where the track erroneously branched out.) I talked to a couple other people with Garmins and everyone’s consistently measured a similarly long distance. So — I’m thinking the course may have been slightly long. But not too awful.
Overall I’m really happy that I decided to run both days. It was certainly an experience I won’t forget — even if I may not want to run on the Seabrook trails again for a while… 😉
I blogged a bit on course length/certification yesterday. Looking at the map on the USATF website, I see a fair number of turns (I assume it was a double loop course?). Unless you ran the absolute tightest line you could run, you’re going to measure long. Unless they put the start or finish line in the wrong place, it was probably accurate.
Good job! And it sounds like you did a negative split, too!