Surf City Half Marathon

It's the first of the month, and we finished our first race together! Today, Noelle and I ran the Surf City Half Marathon. It was an early and cold day, but the weather turned out to be fantastic for a race. The weather stayed in the 50's, yet be both got sunburned. I ran with Noelle for the first mile or so, and then she let me run free like the wind. We started out at the very end, so I ended up having to weave about to pass the walkers. The hardest part of the race was when I saw all the runners already on the home stretch, and I'm just not sure when the turnabout is at. However, after circling around, I hit my stride, my "runner's high," and had a comfortable run from mile 9 onwards. It was a fairly flat course, so I was better able to maintain a good pace. I have never ran more than 10 miles at one time, and given all the interviews this past month, not much time to train either. Well, the results are in: I accomplished my goal of finishing in less than 2 hours! My final time came out to 1:58:47, with an average pace of 9:04 per mile, or 6.7 mph. I finished 1708 out of 4230 male runners, and 287 out of 638 in my age class of 25-29 y/o, so still in the top 50%!

Noelle clocked in at 2:46:03, with an average pace of 12:40 per mile. She finished 4570 out of 6513 of the female runners. I'm so proud of her; this is her second half marathon, and she beat her Disneyland time by almost 7 minutes! Our goals weren't very ambitious, but we didn't have much opportunity to run together. We'll probably enter the Disneyland Half Marathon in September, and maybe this time, we'll actually be prepared.