athens half marathon

I ran the Athens Half this morning. This was the first year for the race and I think they did a really great job. The proceeds from the race are going to benefit AthFest music education programs, I think. They should have some impressive proceeds because the 2000 available registrations sold out; at $50 early and $60 late entry, that is serious (although I have absolutely NO idea what it takes to put on an event of that nature as far as cost). Putting on a huge annual event like AthFest probably puts them ahead of the curve on planning a decently sized race. They had lots of pre-race information available, a well organized, if not a little cramped, expo, nice shirts, chip timing and plenty of “honey buckets” at the start. Couldn’t hear a lick of the PA, though.

My “race” plan ended up still not much of a plan; run around marathon pace or so for the first 8 miles, then decide if I should go faster (if I felt great) or not (if I felt just okay). I ran the first few miles with my officemate from school, who made snarky comments about just about everything and that made the time go by until my ” very conservative” and his “first half marathon” strategies diverged and he headed onward (ended up finishing about 7 minutes head of me). I tried to stick with my main priority of not doing any lasting damage before Saturday and when I got to mile 9, I just kept going with no aspirations for speeding up. I don’t mind saying I walked in the last mile where the hill on Broad Street is and my pace for that mile showed it at 10:40, I think; I figured I was not going to finish in less than two hours at that point, but guessing by my actual time and the timing for that last mile, I was probably wrong. Oops. Totally used the marathon next weekend as an excuse to slack. Sometimes I can walk up hills faster than if I “ran” super slow. I finished in 2:02:50 (761 out of 1791 finishers). I thought about peeing for about 02:07:50, plus the ride home.

The main shortcoming of the race was that the water stations were kind of terrible with one or two tables set up together and it was too crowded to get water without stopping (the exception being the one on Boulevard). Several of them only had a handful of people volunteering with one or two handing out cups so it was mostly people stopping and grabbing a cup off the table and I skipped most of them for those reasons. It made me feel really bad for the people volunteering. I think they were supposed to hand out gel at mile 7, but I didn’t notice (or get it) because that station was super crowded with people stopping (had Shot Bloks anyway). Hammering out getting enough volunteers is probably rough, but they would have been a lot better if they had a table on either side or separate the two tables. The medal is a little dinky, but unless you plan on wearing it around, NBD. The course measurement was spot on – I stopped my Garmin at the line and it read 13.11. It was a cool event and I will look forward to running it again in the future.

I have been working on school stuff all afternoon and consider this probably the first day of a rough couple of weeks. The draft I have of my thesis is clocking in at 112 pages (including appendices)…MS Word just gave me a heart attack when I opened the document and it took a couple of minutes to show the full length. Walking the dog would probably be good for legs+sanity.

the luck of the…

I have been super wiped out for the past week. School is busy and just as I got settled into some new work, my old work picked up a little again. It beats having nothing to do, that is for sure. I’ve also slept through the night multiple nights in a row for the first time in at least six months. I still wake up in the middle of the night, but I go back to sleep instead of waking up at 1:40am every single morning. My brain feels empty and sleepy already, so I am just going to check in with my last two weeks of running.

Also, I never win stuff online, but in one week I won a giveaway from Vanessa at Vanessa Runs, a Run Happy shirt from Brooks via the Brooks Running Club on Facebook, and Bondi Bands in week one of the Racevine winter giveaway (it just occurred to me that it’s not really winter anymore). Brooks usually gives away t-shirts on Fridays and the Racevine contest is on for a couple more weeks, so go submit reviews if you want to win. I need to win some free marathon entries, but I might need a little more contest mojo for that to happen.

Starting with pre-ING, what apparently was a mega taper week. What the heck did I do all week? Not sure.

3/14 sunday – off
3/15 monday – 3.25 miles, 29:00
3/16 tuesday – off
3/17 wednesday – 2.11 miles – 20:00, 45:00 spin class
3/18 thursday – 3.25 miles, 30:00
3/19 friday – 45:00 spin class
3/20 saturday – off

total miles run: 8.61 (!)
total run time: 1:19:00
total cardio: 2:49:00

And moving into marathon week…

3/21 sunday – ING Georgia – 26.36 miles (they were on my Garmin, I ran them, and I will take the extra .16) – 4:30:49
3/22 monday – off
3/23 tuesday – off
3/24 wednesday – 4.31 miles, 40:00
3/25 thursday – 3.22 miles, 28:01
3/26 friday – 1:00 spin class, 3.0 miles – 26:17
3/27 saturday – 3.15 miles, 28:28

total miles run: 40.04
total run time: 6:33:35
total cardio: 7:33:35

I have to mention that I played keg kickball for a couple of hours on Saturday and was in more pain than I’ve been in after any race (marathon pain is gone within two days, this was still lurking on Tuesday). Somehow I don’t think I can count this as exercise since beer was involved, even if it was mostly spilled all over myself.

I’ve run 16 miles so far this week, putting me at a somewhat weak 120.86 miles for March (down from 159.94 in February), but I can chalk that up to a pretty generous taper week (about 25-30 miles less than a regular week) plus missing a few days being sick at the beginning of the month. I’m going to shoot for 160 in April; no big races, just some fun shorties like the Terrapin 5k plus one and the Twilight 5k. I ordered and received a copy of the [Jack] Daniels Running Formula, so I need to open it with my hot little hands and figure out what torture to impose on my body to get some faster times.

you can find me in the A

My last run has been run and I am feeling good. Nothing left to do but check endless items off of my to-do this before this weekend. I do have a case of taperworms, but other than feeling flabby, hungry, and unsure of myself, it’s been a pretty rad week of not really running or working out. I need a couple more songs for my playlist so I don’t have to re-start at the end of the marathon, which I always find somewhat demoralizing. Anyone have any suggestions for upbeat music?

I got ogled by some old ladies in Target today. We needed dog food, which was a cheap excuse to go look at other stuff (I have Munchausen-Target financial syndrome…spending $75 when you plan to spend $25 even though you know you’re not really going to spend $25). I checked the sale racks in the activewear section and these two ladies were about fifteen feet away and I hear one of them say to the other, “I want those legs. Can I buy those?” and they start laughing. I tried to spy at who they were looking at and they were looking at me. Nice. It wasn’t even the lady in the Rascal scooter who made the comment, either! It was the one who could walk. I swear.

It looks like this will be the last year for the ING Georgia, at least under this name. Last week, it was announced that ING will no longer be the title sponsor of the marathon after this year. So long, blue and orange everything. It would be cool to have a more Atlanta-flavored title sponsor. Allow me to throw out some suggestions and suspects of potential Atlanta-based sponsors:

- Ted Turner Georgia Marathon
- Cartoon Network Georgia Marathon (this would be the bomb! Aqua Teen Hunger Force pace leaders, please!)
- The Andre 3000 Georgia Marathon
- Hooters Georgia Marathon
- Waffle House Georgia Marathon
- The Designing Women Georgia Marathon (with accompanying Sugarbaker Half Marathon)

There are a bunch of companies headquartered in Atlanta that could make decent, if a little more boring, sponsors (CNN, Delta, Home Depot, Coke, UPS, Chick-fil-a).

I’ve been adding adding some race reviews to Racevine, which is kind of a cool site that you can comment on different races. It’s pretty easy to use and not as ugly or cumbersome as using Active.com, but the content is still limited and they are having a contest for the next few weeks presumably to build it up. Many of the prizes are more suited for someone living on the west coast/Bay Area, so if you live in that direction you should check it out. I think they could improve the site by allowing users to ask questions to people who have reviewed a race, or somehow making it more in-depth without going the way of being another running-oriented social networking type site. You can see a list of the races I’ve reviewed so far here.