I wanted to see if I can maintain a consistent 7:15 pace throughout and it felt pretty easy on this course. Miles 3 and 4 were somewhat uphill, but then it was a nice stretch of a downhill coming up. It was getting warmer, and I was considering losing my gloves. I passed a few people running a half, and for a while was running solo, with only a few runners ahead by about 1/4 mile. Lots of drink stations were setup along the way, it felt like they were there every 1/2 mile. In one case the station was set up on the other side of the road, which was strange - but the road was closed to traffic, so it was not too bad, except for additional few yards I had to cover to get there and back to the edge of the road. The road was covered with enough slippery mud to make this for a challenging few miles, especially when we headed back towards Camarillo airport.

The last 4 miles were run around the airport, and it was a little confusing, since the road was sort of open to traffic. At one point we ran across the way, and the car was coming in from behind :). In any case, I was at about 7:12 min/mile coming up to the last 2 miles. I picked up the cadence a little, and started sprinting once we hit the turnaround behind the airport. Passed a few more people, and boom - ran into a serious headwind. Thankfully, we turned off the main road and ran on some dirt path for the last 1/2 mile. I hit the finish line, the watch was showing 1:34:36, which would make it for a solid PR.

Not much - a great 1/2, did exactly what I wanted.

The organizers had a small table with your typical post race food - bagels, bananas, oranges, pretzels and some Recovery Powerbars. The Powerbars were pretty dense and chewy, and had to be washed down with 2 glasses of water. I liked them overall, but Clif bars are better IMO. In any case, hung around for a bit, talked to a few other finishers, and then headed back to the car.


I am in the middle of training for LA marathon, so with a little bit of rest and downtime, I probably could have done better.


Good race, cheap and an easy, fast course. Of course, you have to watch out for cars in some spots... but no complaints.