A Race a Month // February

The Mercedes Half Marathon : 13.1 miles

Before: I trained for about 10 weeks, and the last two were the hardest, I wasn't sure I was ready to run 13.1 miles. My goal was to finish around a ten minute mile average, or a finish time of 2:10:00. I woke up at 5AM to stretch and get myself in the zone. I was downtown by 6:15 and I had never seen so many runners in my life. My stomach started to churn. The temperature was 24 degrees and windy, I tried not to thin of all the things stacked against me. Lining up was crazy, there were so many people. The gun went off and I didn't even cross the start line until two minutes later.

1-3rd mile: These flew by. There were so many people running and so many people cheering us on. I had water and Gatorade at a few of the stations. I was starting to get hot and so I ditched my gloves. My pace was about 8:33 mile. I was nervous I was going out too fast but I couldn't run any slower.
4-6 mile: Started to get cold and my hands felt numb, nothing hurt running wise though. I was in the zone hardcore. I was passing people on the hills and really kept my pace strong. I passed the 10k mark and knew I could finish under 2 hours if I kept my pace up. That motivated me even more.
6-11 mile: I really don't remember much of these except how cold it was. We were in the shade and my fingers were frozen. This was also the incline part of the race. At about mile 9 my hamstrings started tightening up, but I just kept my eyes on the prize. I was still maintaining a 8:33 pace.

sorry for the blurry photo, my mom wasn't use to my new camera

12-13 mile: This is where the people started thinning out, the full marathoners were seperated from the half and the course was flat. The sun came out and it was pretty easy to maintain my pace. The last mile I realized I was gonna finish in under two hours and I kicked it into high gear. The last mile was an 8:00 pace. When I came down the finish shoot there were a million people and I just sprinted... I couldn't stop smiling and I found my mom and uncle in the crowd. I've never felt anything like what I felt when I finished. It was unreal.

After: I could barely walk about 5 minutes after I finished. My legs just locked up and no amount of stretching could help. But it eventually went away. I placed 23/169 in my age group and 913/4500 overall. I'm so proud of myself and all my hard work paid off. I wanted to quit the training so many times, but the feeling of running this race outweighed all the negative. I'm hoping to run a full marathon this October :)

Time: 1:54:32 // 8:42 pace