Maine Half Marathon! Race Recap

I completed my fourth half marathon!  It was a perfect day, with temperatures in the mid-fifties and partly cloudy for most of the race.

Race day strategy: My goal was to head out at my PR pace (around 10:30) and try to pick it up the last few miles if I felt good.  Mostly, I was chasing a feeling – I wanted to run strong for the entire race without having to walk.  I never walked, although I did stop to drink water at three water stations (I find it just spills everywhere if I run with it, and I am in the way of other runners if I try to walk).    Coming into the finish, I thought I was set up for a PR (under 2:16:12) but I hadn’t mathematically adjusted quite enough for the two slow miles I had (with water stops and hills, averaging in the 10:40s for pace) and for the fact that it’s a long course.

13.1 – more like 13.27! Since there are lots of curves and turns, if you’re not running tangents and hitting every corner using the shortest distance to get there, the Maine Half Marathon race course is more than 13.1 miles.  My Garmin said I ran 13.27 miles, and that extra .17 cost me some time.  It meant the difference between averaging 10:24 pace according to my Garmin vs. 10:31 pace according to my official race results.  My time was 2:17:49.  I’m happy with that!

I’m learning to pace myself: The good news?  I worked hard, and I couldn’t have worked much harder without jeopardizing my ability to finish the race.  After crashing at mile 7 of my 3rd half marathon in June, it was really important to me to pace myself and finish the race strong.  Racing long distances means finding the balance between working hard enough to finish with no reserves, and not working so hard that you don’t finish.  Could I have run a faster race without needing to walk in the last three miles?  I’ll never know.  But when I woke up at 3:45 this morning to take Advil because my legs hurt, I felt pretty confident that I nailed this race in terms of putting in just enough effort to make it to the finish line on empty.

I’m going to be honest – I didn’t pick it up much until the very end, when Greg came to run me in towards the finish and I could see all my amazing spectators.

Spectators: My in-laws got up at 5:30 a.m. to drive us over to the starting line and watch us race.  My parents and my sister watched Will & Andrew overnight (so we could sleep at my in-laws and get rested!) and drove them over to the finish line where they saw both of us finish.  (Including the 45 minute wait in between!)  My brother and his wife and their two year old and 3 month old came over to watch also!  It was a pretty impressive turnout, and I felt grateful that all of these people supported us enough to drive over and stand in the wind and wait for us to cross the finish line.  It’s a pretty big deal to me, still, that I’m able to run a half marathon, and it meant the world to me to have ELEVEN people waiting to see me finish!  (Ok my youngest niece slept through most of it and MAY not have seen me finish.)  What a joy 🙂  It made it very worth traveling to my home state to run!  I really had 12 spectators, because Greg’s brother watched us on the course just after the halfway point!  I was really touched that he waited to see me go by, because he had to stand at that spot for half an hour after Greg passed him to see me go by.  I was so excited that as I ran by him I shouted “I’m running the race!  I’m running the race!”  He agreed that I was, in fact, running the race.

Greg finished in 1:31:00, 54th overall out of 1977 people and 10th in his age category.  He’s amazing and inspirational, and it still cracks me up that I’m actually running the same race he is, regardless of how much longer it takes me.