The mob had started and it took about 5 minutes for me to get to the start. We finally get going and it's absolutely elbow-to-elbow, toe-to-heel for miles it seems. First miles ticks off and my Garmin shoes 9:03 and I start making a better effort to pass people. I zig-zag through people and even jumping on the sidewalk here and there. I'm constantly passing people and I'm feeling good.

Somewhere between mils 5 & 6, I'm finally in the group where I probably should have started. I also found a good pacer and we are still passing people, but not nearly at the rate I was before. I'm still feeling good, although the climbs are taking a bit out of me. We branch off from the marathoners to an out and back (Matilda?) and this is where I begin to realize I'm not going to be able to hold my pace and I walk my first aid station. I realize that I've not gone under 8:00 on any miles and I've completely dismissed my 1:45 goal. At this point, the plan was to try to hold 8:30 miles to the end. Around this time, I got a nice charge from Doughboy & jcagg90 who were riding the course yelling out encouragement.

Well, that didn't last too long and I started realln hurting. There wasn't really any one thing that was unbearable and my legs were okay. I was getting side stitches and cramps in both shoulders. I tried a few things to deal with these, but ultimately, I cracked mentally and had to take a few 30" walk breaks over the last 5k. I was never so relieved to see a finish line in my life.

I should have thought to find the pacers when staging in the corral.

Grabbed my stash from the food tent, sat on the curb, took off my shoes and vegged a bit. I don't know why, but my feet hurt tons more than they ever have before and for the first time I got a few blisters.

Then, wandered over to the marathon finishing line with my parents to cheer on those finishers.


It just wasn't my day.

Overall, I'm happy with the results and have learned alot about running a HM.


This was my first big race and half marathon. I really wasn't experienced or prepared for all of the little things involved. The only thing I can think of that I did right was taking the Dart rail from Plano to downtown. I would have been stressed sitting in traffic to get to parking.

Overall, this was a good race and things were run well. Improvement needs to be made on the event shirt pickup (45min wait after I had my bib) and I was disappointed with the post-race food.