The MS Runner

Running While Battling Foot Blisters, Leg Cramps, Black Toe Nails - and MS

Archive for the ‘Platte River Half’


Yes, I’m back

Ok, I know I suck because I haven’t written in like forever.  For some reason, I don’t feel creative anymore, and it is tough to get motivated to write more that a couple of sentences.  I’ll try harder though.

I ran the Platte River Half Marathon last month, just 3 weeks after my marathon.  I was recovered from the marathon, but not close to being trained for the half.  I ended up at 1:56:07, which wasn’t all that bad.  I did take a few walk breaks because my knee started hurting.  I was 15th out of 43 in my age group, and if I was a chick, I would have come in 2nd in my age group!

My next run was the Cherry Creek Sneak, which I had previously vowed never to run because there are sooooo many people.  I mainly ran it because it was promoted by Runners Roost, of which I am on the race team for.  There is a 1 mile run, a 5K run, and a 5 mile run.  I did the 5 miler.  Leading up to this race was the fact that I had been sick again.  Diane thinks I have allergies,of which I have never had before.  I believe she is correct!  When I got to the race, I hooked up with other Runners Roost race team members, and we decided to take off for a “warm up run”.  Yeah right.  Their warm up pace was faster than my race pace!  After a little while, I faked the fact that I had to tie my shoes, so they took off without me.  Thank goodness!  So I lined up with the many other million runners at the start, shoulder to shoulder.  My mistake here was I was about in the middle of the pack, and when we started, it was like an episode of the Keystone cops.  Everybody was running every which way and it was hard to maneuver around.  I weaved in and out for about a mile and a half, and I was exhausted.  I was running at the pace I wanted to be at the start, but all the bobbing and weaving left me with no energy.  The last 3 miles were not pretty!  I ended up at 42:35, which was 26th out of 103 in my age group, but it was 3 minutes slower than I should have been.  Oh well.

Next  weekend my son Jason is getting married in North Carolina.  This makes it all 3 kids that are married now.  My daughter Kari is expecting her first child in August, and she already knows it’s a girl.  Micheal has his 1 year anniversary this month.  It seems like yesterday they were all just kids themselves playing football in the front yard.  Time surely does fly.

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.