Today, I ran my 4th half marathon. Whoever's idea it was to have a half marathon in August...I shake my fist at you. Regardless, I ran with several of my Team In Training teammates and Taylor ran about 10 minutes ahead of us for his first ever half marathon!
Despite my complaints, today was actually a blissfully low-humidity and relatively low-teamperature day for early August. The race started at 7am, so we had to leave the apartment by 5:30am to get our bags checked and on the trucks to be taken to the finish line. After that, we had about 45 minutes to wait for the start. It was a beautiful morning, though, so despite the early hour, I have no complaints.
The first 7 miles of the race took place in Central Park - very familiar territory from training for the marathon this past spring. This part of the race was ok, but the BEST part was leaving the park and turning south on 7th Avenue. For the next 17 blocks, we essentially had a wide-open view of Times Square, eventually running through it before turning and running over to the West Side Highway. Except for the fact that I literally fell on 7th Avenue (luckily no one ran me over), this was my favorite part of the race.
After Times Square, we took a left onto the West Side Highway and ran all the way down along the Hudson River to the finish line at Battery Park. I actually felt pretty good for the last 4 miles of the race despite the climbing temperatures and lack of shade. I crossed the finish line with a personal-worst time of 1:58:33, but I'm not too disappointed considering I didn't do a good job training for the race.
After the race I met up with Taylor who did VERY well in his first half marathon. Then we grabbed brunch with his family and went home to stretch, shower, and RELAX.
Whew!
1 comment:
Congratulations!! So glad that you did not get run over, or hurt yourself when you fell. I probably couldn't run that far in 2 days, so I think you did very well!!
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