My First Half Marathon

Little Back Story:

When I was working at NCOBS I started wishing I had more time to get into running.  Back at UGA I was mainly climbing, and in the winter all the snow made it kind of sketchy...  Come April though, I found myself in a (beautiful) temperate rainforest biome, and decided I'd try it out.

 

My first day in Skagway I ran 15 minutes, and every other day after that I just added 5 minutes.  I got sick early May, but after that I just kept increasing my distance until about a week before the race I ran 9 miles.  Not only did I run 9, but I also felt like I could have ran more after...

 

And in a week (6/8/13) there was the Skagway Half and Full Marathon...

 

So...

 

$15 later, I was signed up!

 

And after a week of tappering...

 

Race Day!

(feat the two runners from our company) 

And the starting line!

And we're off!

About 2 miles in we started to spread out

Much more spread out around mile 5

And after passing like my 10th person,
I was feeling pretty good!

And the half way point!
My original goal was just to run it period, but after I got to the half way point at 1:07:00, I figured there was a chance I could run it closer to 2:00:00.  I never really thought I would get under, but I just wanted to see how close I could get.

 

The beautiful views helped my motivation...
(beginning of uphill shown above)

My push was going pretty well until I hit the mile and a half long mild uphill at about mile 8. After I got through that the smile was gone, and by mile 10 I felt like I was running hills. 

On that note, running hills was a brilliant way to train, because when I felt that way I knew I just had to embrace the suck and keep pushing through.

  

And the finish line!
(I was haulin it, thus the tilt) 

In the end, I finished with a time of:

2:01:02.

 

STOKED!

 

I then proceeded to walk around for about 3 hours, congratulate my friend who ran the marathon, and recover!

 

 

WHAT'S NEXT

After race day I downloaded about 15 running podcast episodes, bought myself a new pair of trail-runners, and (after resting) have begun to train for a MARATHON!

 

More info on that to come.

 

ENJOY!
CHRIS