This was a training run. I figured it would be a good opportunity to get a hard long run at it was. I went out and settled into a small group with 3 other runners...2 guys and a girl. The girl ended up leaving us in the dust and ran something like 1:20. One of the guys stuck with me and I eventually found out that this was his first 1/2 and he had hoped to run 1:45. I told him we were on pace for 1:22 at 6 miles and he seemed a bit concerned :) I knew he wasn't going to hold on but he put up a good fight for a while. By the 8th mile he was gone. I ran a very consistent pace aside from miles 1 & 3 where I was too fast and the last mile or so where I was struggling to hold on and then shut it down in the last 200m when I saw that I wasn't going to PR.

I might have went out a bit fast but overall I just gave it my best effort. A nice taper would have helped for sure.

So my legs really didn't want to but I knew it would do me good to get a cool down jog so I did about 5min of easy jogging and a lot of stretching.


Well, if I were looking for my best performance then I probably should have cut about 10 hours of training this week but since I was using this race as a hard workout then I guess I couldn't expect much more. I got a good hard run at the end of 2 solid weeks of build-up for Clearwater. Maybe next season I can actually train for and focus on a 1/2 to see what I can really do.


For the first year of this race I was impressed with the organization and all of the planning. There were only ~550 runners but they did it right and I'm sure this race will build into a great event once word gets out.