Sam Costa Half Marathon - RunHalf Marathon

This was a training race for the Mini in 5 weeks, so I had no intention of racing it full out. My plan was to run the first 15k at a moderate tempo pace (7:15-7:20), which is faster then my long run pace but slower then my race pace, and then finish up the last 5k at race pace (6:50).

The first half started out fine. I was holding consistent 7:15's for most of it. I did slow down to chat with a guy for about a mile, then picked the pace back up. During this part of the race we were running into a light headwind, which was adding a chill and making the pace seem harder then it was.

Around mile 9 we turned a corner and now had a nice tail wind. The temperature had warmed up another 5 degrees, so it was REALLY nice running weather. I was starting to get warm even wearing shorts and a long sleeve tech shirt. I feel really sorry for the people I saw running in full tights and wind coats based on the starting line temperature. Because of this change in conditions, I started to speed up a little and was holding low 7's all the way until mid mile 10.

Mile 10 was where I had decided it was time to turn up the pace. At this point I was already averaging right around 7:00 miles and my stomach was starting to rebel a little. I don't know if it was the oatmeal I had for breakfast or the nasty blue gatoraide they were passing out on course. I knew it wasn't going to be pretty, but I decided to HTFU and run faster. At this point we were in neighborhoods with curvy streets and my garmin decided to stop giving steady pacing info. One minute I'd look down and it would say I was doing 7:30's and the next I'd be doing 6:20's. So I decided to forget that pacing and just run at my perceived LT pace. When we finally hit a straight, flat piece of road and the garmin settled down, I looked down and was holding steady 6:40's, which is 10 seconds under my goal pace. By mile 11, my slight stomach discomfort turned into gut-wrenching cramps and I had to slow back down to 7:00's until they went away.

Pre-race routine. I need to find something better. Overall, I think the nutritional content worked well. I did feel hungry at the start of the race, but I didn't feel like I was bonking at the end (and I only had 2 splashed of nasty blue gatoraide within the first 6 miles). Even though it worked well, it didn't settle well with my stomach and really started to limit my performance towards the end of the race.

Light stretching while waiting for race results


1. Nutrition. Breakfast killed my gut when pushing at race level.

2. Lungs. For some reason my meds aren't dialed in anymore and I started having breathing issues. Not that big of a factor for the first 15k, but as soon as I picked it up to race tempo, they started to become a limiting factor.


It was a smallish race, but well ran. Even though they didn't use chip timing, the results were still timely and (from what I can tell) accurate. There were some issues with people going off course this year due to volunteers being in the wrong spots, or not properly directing traffic, but from what I can tell that was the first time it has happened and the RD was exceedingly apologetic and insisted that it WILL be fixed next year.