I can’t call this a race report, because we didn’t
race it. We ran it – much like a long run with maybe just a little bit
more oomph than we would typically have in a long run. In the end, it
was perfect pacing. We felt strong, and had
fun, and we weren’t tired/sore afterwards. Mission totally
accomplished.
I picked Kari up in the afternoon and we drove the
~3hrs to Myrtle Beach. We had pizza and a giant chocolate chip cookie
for dinner and then went to our hotel. Even though it’s a fairly big
event with 10,000 total runners, finding cheap
but nice accommodations and non-crowded restaurants was very easy. We
stayed right on the beach and had a shuttle to the race start. This is
what happens in the off-season of a very popular summer beach town.
This is what we woke up to:
It pretty much poured rain up until the start. Kari
and I huddled with many others at the outer edge of a tent to try and
stay warm and dry. Neither of us had any rain gear so our outerwear was
pretty much soaked by the time we took it
to the bag drop at 6:15am. We then jogged around a parking lot trying
to stay warm. We made it to the starting corral and seeded ourselves
back aways and pretty much all of the sudden the horn blew and we were
off.
We had talked about not wanting our first mile to
be faster than 8:00 and how that should feel like we’re walking. We hit
the first mile at 8:09 and my first thought was, “Uh-oh. That didn’t
feel as easy as I was hoping.” But we dropped
it to 7:40 the next mile and it was fine – from mile 2 until the end we
bounced between 7:30 – 7:43 miles. It was a headwind going out and we
tried to draft as much as we could (which wasn’t a whole lot) and then
had a nice tailwind on the way back in. The
last mile was one final turn to the finish and we were running back into the
headwind which had picked up significantly – 30mph gusts, which we
powered our way through. This flat section felt like we were running
directly uphill – but we felt fine since we hadn’t
run any miles that were very taxing overall. We passed people the
entire race and the miles clicked off very fast. We ended up running
just a few seconds over 1:41 and although this is way off my pr, it went
by the fastest of any half marathon I’ve ever
done. It’s definitely more fun to run with someone the whole way.
We got massages right after and then went to find
our bags from earlier. We were both freezing by this point and our
pre-race clothes were soaked so this was not awesome. It was windy and
cold and we just wanted to get back to our warm
hotel room, which was 1.5 miles away. We knew we weren’t going to be
able to make it there on foot as popsicles so we found our shuttle and
sat in it for 40 or so minutes before it finally left to take us back.
We cleaned up and hit one of the 50 pancake houses on Myrtle Beach before heading to the outlet mall where we found
some great deals – before both complaining that our feet hurt and
heading back (with just one ice cream stop along
the way). Endurance shoppers we are not.
Marty had a busy weekend while I was away, being #1
dad and hosting a swim clinic on Saturday morning. He met some friends
on Saturday night with Logan in tow and they had a fun guy’s night. He
sent me this picture from a new brewery
that just opened right near our house.
Nope.
Phew. It seems like we’re still doing all right with this parenting thing.