It was a particularly nice morning for a race.....too bad I didn’t run a particularly nice race. L

 

Not that I ran poorly, just not up to what I expected, especially under the fairly cool temps and low humidity we had. Last year in this race, I came as close to a sub-2 hour half marathon as I have come in my second running life when I ran it in 2:00:27....except for the 1:56 I ran for a half marathon split in the Philly Marathon last November. I wanted to go for a solid sub-2:00 race in this one, but my mildly arthritic hip has been bothering me for the past few days. Especially, during the first 5 miles of my 22 mile LSD Friday. It didn’t seem quite as bad this morning, but still enough that I knew it was there. I decided to just make this race a brisk tempo run. Based on the 5 mile race I ran the week before, that meant a 9:15-9:30 pace. So, I set that as my single, simple race goal.

 

The problem with running this one as a pace race was the lack of mile markers. The past two years, this race had markers every mile. This year, I only saw them at 1, 3, 6,7, 15k (I don’t understand why that one!), 11 and 12. And at least one, probably two, were misplaced. The lack of mile markers made it difficult to really know how consistent pace was from mile to mile.

 

I started near the back of the pack and used the first mile for a warmup. My hip bothered me a bit for the first 3 miles, then wasn’t much of a factor for the rest of the race, but I didn’t want to risk pushing it too hard. After the first mile, I had running room and just tried to run a hard 90-95% effort, but not one that felt like a full race effort until the last couple of miles. My average pace was 9:34 for the first 6 miles, 9:18 for the second 6 miles and 8:50 for the last 1.1 miles.  Final time - 2:02:56.

 

I felt OK with the race. It gave me a hard workout at the end of a 57 mile week that included a 22 mile run two days before the race. And, my hip has felt better during the 36 hours since the race.

 

This is a race that I will be hesitant to run again. It simply had too many problems. The race day packet pickup was a bit disorganized. Even those who picked up packets in advance still had to pickup shoe chips race morning. The dearth of mile markers was inexcusable. And the awards ceremony was abysmal. The presenter had almost all of the finishing times of the winners wrong and finally resorted to asking each award winner his/her finishing time so he could announce it....and this race used the chip!! Maybe next year I'll travel up I95 and do the Philly Distance Run. J

 

Jim2

 

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