Ben’s Race Page

I ran the Lincoln Memorial Half Marathon yesterday. It was a perfect day for running. I went out without a plan, but before the race, my buddy Tyler said he was going to run 9 minute miles. We ran the first mile together at 8:40 and decided to stay together. I sped the pace up to 8:26 and he wasn’t happy with me, but stayed with me and we ended up running the whole race together. I ran a little slower than I would have and he ran faster than he would have, but it worked out great. There were a lot more hills than I would have thought and that was tough, but it went well. I also didn’t really taper for this race and did a tough spinning class on the day before, so I probably couldn’t have run too much faster. Anyway, there was a big hill at around mile 5 or so and I was going to leave Tyler at the top, but he wasn’t too far behind and we stayed together. There was a girl who was pacing with us for most of the race and somewhere around mile 7, Tyler made a comment that he and I had been chatty and she was probably sick of us. It was a good way to invite her into the conversation and we chatted with her most of the rest of the way. At the mile 12 waterstation, I took off and finished a little ahead of them. I finished strong and met a few people at the end of the race. The girl found us at the end and congratulated us, so that was cool. The post race food was good. They had Arby’s marketfresh sandwiches, pizza, and Mello-Cream doughnuts along with the standard fruit. All in all, this was a great race and I would run it again. The entry fee was very reasonable and I even got a dri-fit shirt in the race packet! The medal is pretty cool, too. It’s a giant penny. Clever.

Also, I finally bought a new nike+. It did okay in this race given that I didn’t bother to calibrate it. I’m happy to have it back to keep track of my runs, especially since my garmin died about 2 miles into my 18 miler a couple of weeks ago.

I’m back on track and I feel good about my running. It’s also nice that the weather has been beautiful this weekend. I’m ready for my 20 mile training run next weekend and the Country Music Marathon at the end of the month.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 8:19 am and is filed under Races. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.