This post is gonna be short on words and heavy on pictures because I like to dumb down my audience. Actually I just don’t want to think and have to write logical thoughts.
Anywhoozles, I got up at 5am, had a cup of coffee and left my house at 5:45am.
I was parked by 6:30am and hung out in my car until 7:15. It was dang cold outside and I wasn’t about to go freeze my schnitzels off outside. At 7:15 I walked over to the start and got into wave 1 which wasn’t full at all.
The race started at 7:30 and we were off. From the beginning I wasn’t really sure how hard I wanted to run so I wasn’t going to turn on my music for at least 7 miles. That lasted about 10 steps. Needed some motivation so I turned on the tunes.
Saw skintight Elvis.
The weather was warming up quickly; I wish I would have brought sunglasses because I’m sure I now have 2 new wrinkles from squinting the whole time. Better up the Botox budget…
I assumed that the course was flat because the website says,
This course is the fastest in the San Diego area and one of the fastest in the U.S.
It might be fast, but it is NOT flat. There were some rolling hills and a large hill or two thrown in there. Maybe it threw me off because I was expecting flat, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a big wimp.
But the course was absolutely gorgeous. The first few miles we ran through Carlsbad and then we went right along the ocean for a few miles before turning around.
Saw Cupid’s men. Look at that Victorian house in the background! You know you’re married when you don’t even look at the shirtless guys and are more interested in old historic houses.
Is that not gorgeous or what?! Made me want to be running a marathon instead of the half. Obviously still bitter and jealous about it….
I don’t have any mile splits or anything because I didn’t look at my garmin AT ALL until the last mile. I just ran by how I felt and had no idea about time which was sorta “freeing” and sorta annoying at the same time.
We turned around a mile 6.5 and I had a GU then.
I switched it up on breakfast this morning: normally I go with a Clif bar but got crazy today and had a banana and then a GU right before the race started instead of a bar.
On the way back it was fun because we passed all the people who were running the opposite way so it was a good distraction to people watch.
Around mile 10 I finally decided to pick it up and run half marathon pace instead of marathon pace. That’s what’s hard about going from a full to a half: you want to run the easier, slower MP.
So I sped up the last couple miles and finished in 1:36:04, average pace 7:20. 242 out of 7018, 59th woman out of 4324, and 12th in my age division out of 777.
The only split that the official results showed was 6.6 miles: 49:45 Pace: 7:33 so I definitely stopped farting around and started running the last half of the race.
Got my medal, my goody bag of food and headed home.
