Done.
Indian Barbie modeling my medal
I did it! Yesterday was a great day and I actually ended up having a lot of fun which was kind of surprising to me.
The day started early, since the race was at 7am-I was out the door by 5:15 and was thankfully at the race early enough to get decent parking and not have to stress. Just as I was getting ready to get out of my car, I grabbed my fuel belt and realized that it felt a little light. This was not due to my superhuman strength at 6 in the morning, as I would like to think, but had more to do with the fact that I had forgotten the water bottles that go ON the fuel belt. Oh well, thankfully they had water on the course. I walked up to the start, and I mean UP a serious hill, just in time to hear the announcer describing the course and saying, “If you’re looking for a PR, you picked the wrong race!” How encouraging. He went on to detail all the many hills we would be climbing and I started to wonder if it was to late to switch to the 10K. How exactly did I pick this as my first half marathon?
View of the mountains from the starting line
Once we got started, I managed to stop worrying. After a nice downhill start, we meandered on city streets for about 2 miles before entering the Santa Monica Mountains National Park. The next 4 miles climbed slowly and steadily along trails. I took it really, really slowly in fear of what was yet to come. The scenery was gorgeous but the trail was pretty narrow in places which made passing people, or being passed, kind of tricky but people were pretty good-natured in general.
The view from the trail
After mile 6 the climbing started to get pretty serious but I managed to trudge along at my snail-like pace. At about 7.75, I noticed that everyone in front of me had started walking and was starting to wonder what was going on when I turned a corner and saw the trail head up a switchback along the side of a fucking MOUNTAIN. At that point, I walked too-I probably could have made it at least halfway up the switchback but since i didn’t know how close we were to the end of the hills, I didn’t want to push it. After that horrific hill, the trail cruised downhill for a couple of miles, which felt great. Around mile 9 or so, they had some guy spraying some sort of muscle relief gel on people’s legs which I have to say, felt awesome. Feeling awesome didn’t last too long though, as mile 10 was another crazy hill that had to be walked.
After that last hill, the trail went mostly down out of the park and back into the city where the streets rolled up and down before heading into Chumash Park for the finish. At mile 13 I saw my core fan base:
Some were more interested than others…
Apparently, I looked like this:
A little crazed, if you ask me. And don’t ask me why that fuel belt is riding quite so high, I have no answer other than General Dorkiness.
That last stretch did feel great, and I had enough left in me to haul ass to the finish as fast as I could. My chip time was 2:32:00. Not as fast as I would have liked, but for my first half, I’m just glad I finished and ran probably 90% of it. I’ll definitely pick a flatter course for my next half and hope for a better time, but the scenery on this course definitely made it worth slogging up all those hills.
Afterwards, there was some celebrating:
All pictures courtesy of my wonderful husband and our fancy new camera-thanks, Brian!
And then we went to my sister’s house for waffles and bacon. Pretty much a great morning. We leave for Hawaii in a few hours…hope to post from there if I can fit it into my busy schedule.
6 comments April 6th, 2008