A “training” half marathon

I ran the Platte River Half Marathon this past Sunday, and did it as a training run.  I was scheduled to do 12 anyway, so I thought why not add some spice to my training by doing this half marathon?

It was almost a perfect day for a run, but just a tad too cold.  I had 3 layers of shirts on, and that turned out to be too much even though it only got to 30 degrees by the end.  So at the beginning, I was fine, but by mile 5, I was getting too hot.  I stuck it out until mile 9 though and attempted to take off my top layer.  The problem was I forgot to undo my MP3 player from my arm.  So I’m kind of running, and trying to take this top off, and it ended up being a wardrobe malfunction.  I had to pull off onto the side and untangle everything, which ended up being quite a chore in itself.  After almost a minute and a half, I was free, and I resumed my run.

The course was almost all downhill, with a few uphills thrown in for grins, until we got to mile 12.  Then there was the “infamous” 8th street bridge.  It is a 350 foot change in altitude in about a half mile.  Plus where you have to go, it’s only like a skinny sidewalk, and it was very wet from the snow melting from the runners.  Not a pretty sight.  I went from doing a 8:45 pace to 9:35.  Oh well, like I said, it was just a training run.  So with my wadrobe malfunction and the dreaded bridge, I ended up at somewhere around a 1 hour 56 minute time.  I forgot to turn off my Garmin at the end, and there wasn’t any timing chips, so I’m guessing it was somewhere around there because my “official” time was 1:58:11.  Not bad.