This was a pretty disappointing race. The course was fairly hilly, but I've been training on hills. It was also really cold, with some icy spots on the course, but none of that slowed me town too much.

I went out for the first mile at 8m/m pace, and the second mile at slightly over that. Then, I started slowing down, but I didn't really *feel* like i was slowing down. I was sort of convinced that the numbers were lying to me (that was fucking stupid). I knew that the second half of the race had a lot of downhill, so I figured that I could make up some time there. And at mile 8, down some pretty decent hills, I felt like I was flying. But, apparently, I wasn't.

I'm always afraid of going out too fast. Maybe I did go out too fast, and that caused me to slow down. Or, perhaps I should have put aside my worries about going out too fast, believe me watch, and push myself (around mile 3 and beyond) when I found myself slowing down. I'm pretty awful at pacing.


I don't know.

Walking, eating, stretching, and freezing.


I don't know! When I'm not feeling up to it, I have a *very* hard time pushing myself into a zone of mental or aerobic discomfort. I need to find ways to do this. Perhaps speed or hill work outs would do the trick, but I'm pretty worried about getting injured, especially since the next few weeks will be a building phase.


I'm not really sure what to think at this point. I've done training runs at a faster pace (though I've done some at a slower pace too, when having a bad day), and from what I hear, I should be able to perform better during at race than on a training run. Maybe I could just blame this on a 'bad day', but that isn't satisfying. I'm feeling pretty jaded. I performed worse here than my first half marathon two years ago in SC. The course was much flatter in SC, and the weather conditions were pretty optimal that morning. But given two years of training, I really wish that I could have seen some substantial improvement. I don't want to run another slow marathon. I'm not sure what I need to do differently. Should I try to run my long training runs faster? Should I try to run my short runs faster? Is it nutrition? I certainly don't want to get injured.