Chicago Half Marathon - RunHalf Marathon

My grandfather passed away earlier this morning, but I opted to do the race anyway. Made for an emotional run.

First 3 miles were spent weaving in and out of people, trying to find room to run. Hard to say whether this helped or hurt later on -- I had a lot of time to make up, but it *did* keep me from going out too fast, I suppose.

Around mile 6, I was finally on pace. Because this was supposed to be just a training run for the marathon, my game plan was to evaluate how things were going at this point and make a decision to continue running hard or not. Decided that I was feeling okay (meaning: nothing hurt too badly) and I would keep running hard as long as I could.

I knew I had no wiggle room; I had to keep pushing hard. There was no letting up if I wanted to get a PR. And I'll say, especially the last couple of miles, I WANTED to walk, wanted to ease up a little. But, I didn't give in.

The last two miles, I stopped looking at the time and trying to calculate splits. I kept an eye on my pace and just ran as hard as I could. Crossed the finish line, saw that I had PR'd by 19 seconds and burst into tears.

Nothing. I was pretty pleased with this, considering I didn't train for it (I've done absolutely no speed work) and wasn't tapered for it, either.

Walked around. Walked back to my car... took the long way around since I got myself all discombobulated and went the wrong way... duh...


Not specifically trained/tapered for half marathon.


This race as gotten better. They changed the course slightly, moved the start/finish line to a better location. Overall - well organized and nice. Perhaps my only complaint is that the first few miles are really congested. They either need fewer people or more time in between letting start corrals go.