Earth Day Half Marathon

Mike and I ran the Earth Day Half Marathon this morning. It snowed a bit overnight and it was windy, just what you would expect for a Minnesota spring race. Running in the cold is fine with me, but I was worried about the wind. My plan was to go out at 9:50 pace and speed up for a negative split, hoping to come in around my Disney Half Marathon time of 2:06:27. If it was too windy or if something hurt, I would back off and use it as a training run. With two more half marathons in the next 5 weeks, if today wasn’t my day then there would be plenty of opportunity to try again.

We drove the hour and fifteen minutes to St. Cloud this morning and parked 50 yards from the start line. After a quick trip into the field house to pick up our packets and to use the restroom, we just waited in the car until it was time to line up. A few minutes before the start we saw our friends, wished everyone luck and we were off. I lined up in front of the 2:10 pace group and was able to run my own pace right from the start. It’s so nice when there isn’t a lot of congestion at the beginning of a race.

I’ve never been to St. Cloud before, and this course is a wonderful introduction to it. Not only is the course flat and mostly sheltered from the wind, but it is beautiful. We ran along the Mississippi much of the way, with snow frosted trees framing the view. When we weren’t enjoying views of the river, we were running through subdivisions lined with bundled up spectators. There were a lot of people out cheering for a race this size, even though weather didn’t make it easy on them. The course was good for viewing and I saw many spectators in multiple spots. After seeing them so many times, it kind of felt like they were there to see me!

Right from the first mile, I felt great. I decided to run by heart rate and perceived effort instead of worrying about my pace. This was my 10th half marathon and I’ve been doing a lot of 10 mile training runs, so I feel like I have a good idea of how hard I can push throughout the distance. Through the first seven miles, if my heart rate ticked up over 160 then I backed off. After that, it was time to get going. I knew I was having a good race and that I could beat my Disney Half Marathon time if I was able to keep it together. Running a negative split has been a goal of mine for the past several races and I ran the second half of today’s race about two and a half minutes faster than the first.

Mike finished and ran back to run me in around mile 12.5. I realized that my PR from 2008 was going to be in spitting distance if the course wasn’t too long. When I ran 2:03:38 at the Gopher to Badger, I ran myself into the ground. I vowed that I would never run that hard again and I figured I would never see anything close to that time ever again. Maybe it’s getting older, or maybe it’s just running a lot of races, but I felt so terrible after that race that no time on the clock would be worth going through that again. When I saw Mike, I told him Iwas going to be close to my PR and we took off. He ran in front and I put my head down and ran as fast as I could.

Mile 13 was all downhill and came in at 8:24. Even running at an 8:18 pace for the last bit, it wasn’t good enough for a PR. The course was just too long at 13.25. That’s really not long for a half marathon, so it’s not the fault of the course. I finished in 2:04:14, 36 seconds away. I beat my Disney time and goal by over 2 minutes, so I wasn’t disappointed at all. I never expected to come close to my PR and really only thought about it for the last mile or so. I finished feeling strong and wouldn’t have done anything differently.

Each race experience is different, and sometimes bad races are the most rewarding because of the challenge. Every once and while, though, the stars are aligned and everything goes well:  the course is good, the body feels rested, the shoes stay tied. When that happens, it’s time to just run and that is what I did today. It was wonderful.