Happy Valley 10k and 5k - Race Report, Results and Photos

Looking for some hill work? Have I got the race for you!

But first, here are the particulars:

Need to see the results? They're right here and/or right here.

Want to see photos of yourself all sweaty and sad-looking? Jake Egbert Photography took care of that for you right here and here.

So, the race.

Well, after the illness and subpar performance at the Corvallis Half, I wanted to get something on the schedule fairly quickly just to keep my training momentum going. And while it was a bit of a drive, Happy Valley is just outside of Portland, the date was about right, so I signed up for this one. Definitely sight unseen. Unfortunately.

As I drove into the Happy Valley area, I noticed immediately that there may be a problem. There's no valley. It should really have been named Happy Hills. I mean, I'm not a stickler for detail, but come on.



Yep, that chart that looks like waves on the open sea? That's the elevation profile. It was actually a 5k loop and the 10k ran it twice, so that's why the halves look very similar.

Anyway, the race started at Happy Valley Elementary and the packet pickup was inside the school. Indoor bathrooms...yes! So after a quick pitstop, about 50 of us 10k runners and around 250 5k runners toed the start line and were off! Well, actually, it was more like, we...were...off... Yes, we started right uphill. No messing around with a flat start, let's just get this thing headed uphill.



As you can see on the map, it was a quick uphill jaunt on King, then a left on 146th. That was a pretty good downhill most of the way, then slightly uphill at the end before we turned onto Ridgecrest. Then some zags and a hill through a neighborhood section and back to Ridgecrest. Then a odd little loop into Happy Valley Park. Downhill going into the park and uphill coming out. Once we took the left back onto Ridgecrest, we got the most brutal uphill of the course, all the way to 132nd. Just had to grind it. Once on to 132nd, it was a pretty good downhill almost all the way back to King. Then another left with some down, then up and we're back to the start and the 2nd lap.



Not sure how, but I kept a very even pace through the first three miles, at 8:10, 8:08 and 8:09. Once we dropped all the 5k runners, I had a bit of a lapse in concentration and dropped to an 8:23, but picked it back up for an 8:07 on mile five. Mile six was sort of slow at 8:23, big hill, then finished it up at about the same pace. Averaged 8:14 overall. Not great, but an improvement over my horrid pace at the Corvallis Half.



Not real happy that my Garmin read 6.44 miles at the end. I realize that kind of course can add a bit to the total mileage, but an extra quarter mile is a LOT of extra running. That's two minutes added to my time. Nope, not happy about that, Happy Valley.

Good cinnamon chip bread from Great Harvest at the finish and some amazaballs bundt cake mini things that were fantastic! I think those were from this place - check them out!

Shirts were pretty cool. They had both tech and cotton, but luckily I grabbed a tech shirt before they ran out.



So there you have it. Not a bad race. Good organization and low-key, but so, so hilly. Probably would not run it again. Now I need to find one or two more of the 10k variety before my next goal half: the Eugene Half Marathon at the end of July.

Corvallis Half Marathon Report and Results

Yeah, I was in about nine pictures, but not a single one was a decent shot. Ah well...when your best photo is the one where you're directly blocked by some guy without a shirt that should never be without a shirt, well...

Here are the free photos if you'd like to look through them.

And note, that I was wearing my AWESOME Blerch shirt from The Oatmeal. "I believe in the Blerch!"

OK, Corvallis Half Marathon. Let's discuss. Actually, let's discuss the week heading to the race.

So last Wednesday, Jen came down with a pretty bad case of the flu. Vomiting, diarrhea, the works. I, of course, teased her about it being great prep for the Half. Yes, foreshadowing.

Fast forward to Friday morning. I wake up with an upset stomach, but not feeling too bad otherwise. Yep, I’ve got the runs too. Oh boy. I still don’t feel awful though. So I’m shaving to get ready for work and am about to get into the shower when I suddenly feel like I’m going to throw up. I mean, it hit me out of nowhere. Super-fast. Sweat on my forehead – the whole works immediately. So I get down on the floor by the toilet and…

Yeah, I’m not sure if you know this about me or not, but when I’m really sick or dehydrated, I pass out. I’ve fainted probably a dozen times in my life, usually when I’ve got the flu or something similar.

…so I come to, and I’m not joking here, wedged in between the bathtub and the toilet with my face resting on the toilet plunger like it’s a pillow. And lord, I know where that thing’s been! Anyway, when I come out of a faint like that, it always takes a good few minutes just to remember where I am and what the hell is going on. But it eventually comes to me: I’m sick, I passed out, I should get my face off the plunger. Oh, and I’ll spare you the details, but did you know that some bodily functions, like vomiting and diarrhea, don’t necessarily stop when you’re passed out? Yeah, the bathroom and I were a god-awful mess.

So I get in the shower just to get cleaned up. Stumble downstairs and get into the floor of the bathroom down there…and proceed to do the whole damn thing over again. Vomit, pass out, diarrhea…in various combinations. I think Jen ended up doing about four loads of laundry just from me that day.

So after about two hours of this, I felt a little better and moved out to the couch. Since I weigh myself every day, I realized the next day that I had lost seven pounds in basically two hours!

So yeah, that was two days before the race. Saturday I felt about 60-70% back to normal and I figured I’d walk the damn Half if I had to – I wasn’t going to just skip it. Sunday, I was up to maybe 80% health. The problem was the illness and the weight loss just took the starch out of me. At about 8 miles, my legs were just jelly. There was an ambulance taking a girl off the course at about mile 12 (it was probably due to the heat – it was pretty warm) and I thought “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Yeah, so that's the short version about why I ran a 1:58 instead of a 1:45 or so that I think I was capable of.

If you're looking for results, check here or here.

For non-free photos, head over here or here.

There was a fair bit of controversy about the new logo for the race. Most people didn't like it. They did clean the final version up a bit and the logo on the shirts actually doesn't look too bad.



Sorry, didn't get a very clear shot on that one. Let's try again.



And the back.



It's one of those races where they give you a "finisher" shirt before you actually run the race. That's OK. I still ran it, even though the temptation was pretty strong.

They also tossed in a decent pair of racing socks with the logo, but I forgot to get a picture of the socks. Sorry about that.

The medal isn't too bad. Better looking than the previous few years, for sure.



So that's that. A very slow Corvallis Half. No biggie. I plan to be in shape - and NOT sick - for the Eugene Half on July 27th. Looking for a PR there.

See you then.

McDonald Forest Trail 15k and 5k - Results and Race Review

Yes, I hauled my injured ribs over to McDonald Forest and ran the thing.

If you just need results, here they are.

As to the results, let me just say, I don't know how anyone could run this very hilly and tough course in a 5:54 pace, so nice job, Chris Reed. Mr. Reed also won this race the last time I ran it, in 2011, so he appears to know how to run hills.

And on to the review!

I had run the McDonald Forest Trail 15k once before, so I knew what to expect. Although a big change for this year's race was that Corvallis has just been completely dry pretty much right through October. So it would be a trail run, but it wouldn't be a muddy trail run. Which was probably good because of the sore ribs and all. So what happens about five minutes before the race starts? Yep, a light rain began to fall. Just enough to wet down all the fallen leaves and make it nice and slippery!

So at a reasonable hour of 10:00am, about 250 of us took off into the rain, and while the Mac 15 starts out first thing going uphill, it's only for a few hundred yards, then the course flattens out and is either flat or downhill for pretty much the first three miles. Which is strange because it allows you to go out pretty fast. And that's nice, but you have to be wary of leaving it all right there in the first three miles. Once the hills start in mile four, you need to have something in the tank.

So I went out very slowly and deliberately to test the ribs, but they felt pretty good. After about a half mile, I tried to turn it up a notch and finished the first mile in 8:30. The second mile has some of the best downhill running of the race. Downhill, but not so steep that you've got to brake yourself. I covered the second mile in 8:01.

Then the fun ends. The third mile isn't too bad, with 141 feet of climbing and 83 feet of descent, but it slowed me down to 9:16. And the fourth mile is a teaser. It's bad - 209 feet of climbing, but it's just trying to get you ready for mile five. Mile five goes up 541 feet! Yeah. So those two miles were 10:05 and 12:45 respectively. That fifth mile just eats up your legs. It hard to get back into a decent rhythm after that.



Mile six has quite a bit of climbing - 255 feet - but also quite a bit of downhill - 287 feet. I hit that one at 11:28, proving what I mentioned about mile five taking the starch out of you.

Finally, the downhills start. Mile seven heads down quite a bit and mile eight falls off a cliff, with 492 feet of downhill. It's hard on your feet, knees and ribs! If it were just a touch flatter, you could actually run this mile faster, but you've got to put on the brakes a bit so you don't face-plant. I hit mile seven in 9:20 and mile eight in 7:35.

Finally, mile nine and you think you're there...but no. They throw in a short uphill section in the last half mile just for fun. I was pretty much done at that point and did not exactly attack the hill. Mile nine was in 10:04. And that was it. My Garmin was way off, so I don't have anything for the last three tenths of a mile. My Garmin showed 8.95 miles when I hit the finish line.

And the shirt? Well, you had a choice between bright yellow and lime green. Hmmmmm..... That's not much of a choice. I went for the lime green. Yowza.



It's actually even brighter in real life. It should be good for night visibility...from space. I think the 5k had a white shirt.

And the emblem on the back of the shirt.



This is one of my favorite trail runs in the area. Tough, but not crazy hard. Long, but not stupid long. Late enough in the year for the chance of mud, but not usually freezing cold. It's a good one. I'll be back.

Skagit Flats Marathon Review and Results

Let's start it off right. Those six fine folks above all qualified for the Boston Marathon at the Skagit Flats Marathon on Sunday. So it was possible! Check them out on the Skagit Flats Facebook page here - nice photo by Ashley Degen.

If you're just looking for results of the race:
-here are the marathon results.
-and here are the half marathon results.

Also, if you're looking for photos from the race, the link at the Skagit Flats Marathon page is incorrect. Here is the correct Jon Brunk link. It doesn't look like the photos are up yet, but I did see at least one guy out there taking shots, so I assume they'll be up soon.

Now to the gory details...

My Skagit Flats Marathon Experience!

Due to some bad luck and timing issues with family and work, I headed up to the race on Saturday. It was about a six hour drive and I was on my own. Not a great way to prep for a marathon, but you do what you have to do. I picked up my number, chip and shirt at about five, had some dinner and then headed back to Seattle to stay the night at my brother's place.

Woke up early Sunday morning and headed back up to Burlington. The weather looked just about perfect: fog and/or low clouds seemed to be the order of the day.



Of course, with that kind of weather, you also usually get some high humidity. My Garmin said it was right at 100%. So, yeah, that's pretty high. It felt good standing around, but once we got going, the sweat came out pretty fast.



I went to hit the Honey Buckets about 30 minutes before the start, then remembered that they were going to open up the high school locker rooms for showers after...might they be open before for bathroom use? Yes, they were! So I walked in to the locker room and just off the entrance door, there was the toilet. No, I mean it was right there. It had a wall around it...about 3 feet tall. And there was a guy sitting on it. I sort of nodded at him...I'm not sure what the correct greeting was for saying "hello" to a guy on a wide-open toilet in the middle of a locker room, but I really didn't want to get into a full-blown conversation. Then I quickly decided that I was going to have to put up with the Honey Bucket after all. Anyhoo...

So the Full and the Half started off at the same time, which wasn't a big deal as there were only about 700-800 runners total, so it wasn't crowded at all. We took off right beside Burlington-Edison High School and meandered north and west toward Padilla Bay on the lonely farm roads that run around the town.



A couple of notes about the course. As the name of the race suggests, this is a flat course. It doesn't go up much and it doesn't go down much. It's just flat. And frankly a little boring. This is farm country and you're pretty much stuck looking at fields and cows and dirt and road. Once in a while, at the few road intersections, where people could find parking, you would have a few people cheering on the side of the road. But if you're looking for crowds and/or interesting sights alongside the course...nope, this isn't it. This is where to come if you want to try to run fast on a flat course. Period.

Here's the elevation profile from my Garmin:



Because of a strained and sore quad muscle in my right leg, I hadn't really run in about a week before the race. It felt OK during warmup and really, during the first 10 miles of the race, it felt pretty much fine. So that was not an issue. Well...the not running may have been an issue, but the muscle was fine.

I fell in with the 3:45 pace group, thinking I could hold that pace. Maybe a mistake, but I had done the first three months of my training program working on a 7:50 pace, so I didn't think an 8:30 pace would be a killer. I was wrong. I only made it about 8 miles before my pace started to fall off. At first I thought I was just sort of tired and would come back around with a second wind, as I sometimes do in training runs. Instead, between miles 8 and 12, my legs tightened up horribly and I slowed and slowed. I tried slowing the pace, stretching a bit, and finally walking breaks, but by mile 16, I was getting cramps in my quads and in my calves. I was even getting cramping in my toes! By mile 18, my legs felt like boards and I was having a lot of trouble running at all. Of course, that's about the time that the fog and clouds lifted and all of the sudden it was HOT and I was looking at trying to finish the last eight miles without being able to do much more than walk and shuffle/jog once in a while.

Check the mile by mile carnage here:



Why the cramping? At first I wanted to blame the humidity, but I was taking in water and sport drink pretty well and I had four GU gels during the race. Besides, newer research says that heat and humidity are not usually to blame for cramps. The more likely reason: my last month of poor training (vacation time plus injury time) left me undertrained to even go out at an 8:30 pace. I really didn't think I'd lose that much fitness that fast, but it's the most likely cause.

If you want to see what it looks like to walk a good part of a marathon, here you go:



So I struggled, STRUGGLED, in to the finish line with a 5:04:13. My slowest marathon ever. Wow.

The worst part, for me, is not the bad experience or the bad result - it's just one more race, after all, there will be plenty of others - but the fact that I wasted four months trying to gauge the effectiveness of the Hansons Marathon Method and pretty much didn't learn anything about it. So does the Hansons Marathon Method work for the Average Joe? Will it get you to Boston? Probably, I don't know, maybe. And I'd love to be able to say, "let's try it again!" But that just isn't going to happen anytime soon. I'm thinking I'll concentrate on some shorter races for a while and have a little fun before heading back to the marathon.

The shirt is nice, you don't see a lot of green shirts except for St. Patrick's Day races, so that's cool. The fit is a little small and the neck hole is tiny, but I've said many times before, the sizing on different brands of tech shirts are an absolute mystery. You get what you get. This one may end up with Payton as I'm not sure I'm fitting into it.



Decent medal. Nothing too exciting, but it fits the race. And I'm not saying that in a bad way. I think this is the perfect marathon for one thing: running fast. It's small, it's low-key, it's flat, and judging from the results, most people had a pretty decent race here. Unfortunately, not all of us, but I may return at some point to try to fix that.



So that's that. We're just not going to think about Boston for a while. Not going to think about marathons for a while. I think I'll let the desire come back on its own well and good time. For now, I'll just concentrate on the shorter races that are in front of me. Moving on!

Next up: McDonald Forest Trail 15k on October 27th.

Run for the Hills 30k Trail Run Race Review and Results

Little late on this one, but better late than blah, blah...

Just looking for results? Here you go.

So anyhoo...last week was the Run for the Hills trail run, usually just an 8k in the Bald Hill area, but a new 30k was added this year.



As I've mentioned before, I signed up for the 30k way back when before I realized I was going to be well into training for my fall marathon, and in fact, in my fourth week of the Hansons plan. My scheduled workout for the Sunday of the Run for the Hills was to be an easy 8 miles. Instead, I was staring at 18.5 miles with about 3000 feet of climbing. Ouch.



So the whole plan for this one was to go slow and not get injured. I still have nightmares of rolling my ankle at last year's Condor Trail Run, which scuttled my training for the California International Marathon. Plus, I didn't want to go full out and be so sore and tired that I'd have to skip my scheduled marathon workouts. So, as you can see here, I started conservatively...that's me, fifth from the very back as we head out from the start line.



The first hill we tackled was Bald Hill, which was fine as I run it all the time, but then we quickly moved on toward Fitton Green, which I don't run all the time, and it was steep going.

I moved past a few people and settled into my pace. It was an interesting course as there were a good number of out and back spokes. So you ended up seeing the same people over and over and could gauge if you were gaining or losing ground. I didn't much care, but for someone up front, I could see that it would be a good course to know exactly where you're at relative to the other runners.

There are a few "ankle-breaker" sections that aren't really "trail." They're more "beaten down weeds over mole hills." You've got to slow down a bit on those.



We finally made it way out on the trail through Fitton Green where it runs along Marys River. Although I walked plenty on the steeper uphills, I never felt too bad. My pace looked OK as long as I wasn't heading up the really steep stuff.



The race director had told us at the beginning of the run that they had decided against placing a water stop at the top of Bald Hill, which turned out to be a tough decision, for me, in retrospect. As we neared the end of the race, maybe a mile and a half to go, we came up the back side of Bald Hill and hit the summit. There was a race marker sign that read "straight." Unfortunately, it was placed about 15 feet in front of a "Y" on the trail. There was no "straight," there was only left or right. I figured maybe they meant to stay on the main, bigger, trail. Another guy at the top agreed with me and we started down the horse trail. About halfway down, I realized we had taken the wrong trail. That's a steep downhill - there was no way I was turning around and going back up. I knew where it came out, down on the bike path, and I knew we'd have to run a little extra to get back on track, but it seemed like the better option. As I came to the bottom of the trail, I came up on another runner who had taken the wrong trail as well. After the obligatory "wrong trail?" and "yep, wrong trail," we headed back on the bike path toward the Fairgrounds parking lot.



I definitely lost a couple places - I saw some people had already finished that were behind me pretty much the whole race - but what are you going to do?

Amazingly enough, even though I was pretty sore and tired, I managed through my Hansons workouts the entire week after the race. Didn't miss a one.

The shirt is clean and sharp-looking. Sort of a different feel for a tech shirt - definitely has more of a cotton feel. I'm not a huge fan of white race shirts, but it's pretty nice all the same.



Good race. With luck, I won't have to worry about marathon training next year and can really race it.

Thanks to Jim MacDonald for the photos.

Corvallis Half Marathon Race Review and Results 2013

The leaders at 2.5 miles in...all by themselves already.


All righty, then!

If you're just looking for the results for the Corvallis Half, here they are.

And if you need a race review, well hey, I've got one of those too.

So waking up this morning, and seeing that it was 38 stinking degrees! did not make me that happy, especially since it was raining as well. It had all the makings of a cold, wet day. Eek.

So I headed to OSU for the start and wandered over to my office to prepare in the indoor warmth. Advantage: me. I thought about wearing my new Mizuno running shoes for the race, but my longest run in them so far was about 4 miles and I just couldn't pull the trigger. So I ended up wearing my old Nike Pegasus Trail shoes - a shoe that I've never been super happy with, but one that I've used on 13+ mile runs.

I stayed in the warmth of my office and just ran up and down the hall a few times to warm up. At about 15 minutes before the start, I headed out and jogged over to the start line - about a 100 yards from my office. Nice.

With very little preamble, we had a 3-2-1 countdown and were off. The weather actually wasn't too bad at that point; no rain and cold, but not horrible. I wore a long sleeve tech shirt and gloves (the gloves as much to wipe my nose as anything else...hayfever).

I hit the first two miles at:
-7:59 / mile one
-7:52 / mile two



That's me in the backwards OSU hat, keeping the non-existent sunshine off my easily-burned head.

When I ran the Corvallis Half last year, and set my PR, I was running about a 7:50 pace. This year, however, I'm about 10 pounds heavier (I'm working on it) and knew I didn't have much of a chance of a PR. Which is probably OK, since I didn't go out too fast like I usually do...and didn't suffer at the end of the race like I usually do.

At the water stop at 2.5 miles in, I said "hi" to Carson and her Girls on the Run buds.



The next three miles were a touch up and down as we ran through the Bald Hill area and my splits looked like this:
-8:00 / mile three
-8:15 / mile four
-8:21 / mile five

I was actually feeling pretty good. I wasn't trying to push it at all - I didn't think I had the fitness for that - just keeping within myself and trying to stay steady.

We hit a nice downhill on the next couple miles as we came out of the park and onto Oak Creek:
-8:04 / mile six
-8:02 / mile seven

Then the uphill as we turned onto 53rd to head to Walnut. Definitely the toughest section of the course. Not too steep, but a fairly long, steady climb. Takes some concentration here to keep pace. My slowest mile:
-8:35 / mile eight



Then the nice downhill right afterward:
-7:58 / mile nine
-8:04 / mile ten

I was starting to wear down a little bit here, but still felt pretty good. Of course, then a woman that had to be five or six months pregnant went by me pretty easily. That's not good for the old ego.
-8:18 / mile eleven
-8:26 / mile twelve

You can always tell the first timers on the course right about here. Reser Stadium is right there in front of you and you can see a few people speed up, thinking they're coming in for a landing. Sorry, but then they turn you back away from Reser for a mile+ trip around the campus for a bit. I saw at least two guys stop and walk as soon as we turned away from the Stadium.

Strangely, I was starting to get cold here again, after warming up during the middle miles of the race. I guess I should have been running faster.

I speeded up just a touch as I started to smell the barn:
-8:17 / mile thirteen
-7:30 / last tenth

The finish in Reser is always fun, although I'm not sure how those football players run so fast on that turf. It's not that easy to run on.

So I came with a 1:46:54, about four minutes slower than my PR. Considering the shape I'm in, or not in, at the moment, I'm happy enough with that. That got me 272nd place out of 1487 overall, and 17th out of 67th in my age group. And 2nd, apparently, in the grouping of me and pregnant women. Well, I hope 2nd...it could be worse than that, I guess.

The shirt is actually better looking than the first two years and the finisher's medal was nicer-looking as well. Way to go, Tyler!



Now I need to figure out what races I'm doing for the rest of the year!

Corvallis Half Marathon - Done!

1:46:54

Results and race review in a bit.

California International Marathon Review and Results (CIM 2012)

"Call me Ishmael."

I thought of the first line of Moby Dick more than once on this swirling maelstrom of a race course at the 2012 California International Marathon. To further butcher a good metaphor, by the end of the race, I wasn't sure if I was Ishmael or the Great White Whale...

First, let's take care of some business.

If you're just looking for results, here they are. They're only unofficial results until Wednesday, I believe, then they should get the official results up.

And here's an article on the winners: Daniel Tapia and Alisha Williams, the first two American winners at CIM since 1999 and 2000, respectively.

Wow, what an experience this one was.

First, as you know if you're a regular R's reader, I simply was not ready for this race. I had injuries. And setbacks.

And if you recall, I had wondered publicly if one could run a marathon on no training. Well, according to my personal sample size of one: yes, you can. But it won't be fast.

So let's go back about a week before the race. It wasn't a secret - the weather forecast did not look good for the 2012 CIM. But it's one thing to look at an online forecast a week before the race.

And it's another to look out your Sacramento hotel window at 5:00am the morning of the race. The rain was coming down in sheets...and the sheets were being blown sideways by huge gusts of wind. It was ugly.

Here's a photo album of the damage the storms had done in the Sacramento area in the days before the CIM.

The third and final of the storms in that series to hit Sacramento was hitting, you guessed it, on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

But what to do except run the damn thing? Well, if I had lived in Sacramento, I may have skipped the whole thing. But I already flew down, got a hotel, rental car, etc, etc...I was running it.

So I put on my finest definitely-not-rain-proof-running-outfit and headed for the buses to take me to the start line. Jen snapped a picture of me in the hotel, looking like a kid heading to his first day of school in a new town, dry and happy.

So Jen drove me as far as she could, then dropped me off. I ran through the driving wind and rain, which in the dark before sunrise, had a scary biblical quality to it, and jumped on a bus to take me to the start line. There were supposed to be tents and such near the start line, but the wind was howling and garbage was flying through the streets; you really couldn't see much of anything. I scrambled to a strip mall next to a gas station, where I actually found decent shelter from the wind and rain. I vowed to stay there until 6:55am, five minutes before the starting gun.

In this photo gallery from the Sacramento Bee, the gas station in Photo #1 is just across from where I was hiding pre-race, and the shelter in Photo #2, is where I was huddled, trying to keep warm.

At 6:55 exactly, I sprinted out to the start line and got close to the 4:00 pace group. I tried to hide behind people, but the course started out directly, head-on, into the wind that was gusting up to 40mph. There was just nowhere to hide. See Photos # 13 and 14 in the gallery just above to see what I'm talking about.

They played the Star Spangled Banner, gave us a couple "good lucks" and we were off! The first two miles were IN. SANE. The wind and rain was hitting your face like hail, so you had to keep your head down, and hopefully had a hat on, so you could keep some rain off your face. Only that made it so you didn't see the garbage bags, gloves, t-shirts and sweatshirts that were coming back like missiles, blown by the wind. Cardboard garbage cans and plastic garbage bags were flying around. People were jumping and dodging trying to miss branches and palm fronds down in the street.

Crazy.

The wind was coming from the South, so as you can see on my Garmin map, it was either in our faces or blowing sideways across us the whole way. It was never behind us, on this point to point course, so it never helped us.

As befitting my horrid last two months of training, I went out fairly well, then faded oh so quickly right around the half marathon mark. I wanted to stay with the four hour pace group as long as possible and actually slowly moved up with the 3:55 group for quite a while. But after 13 miles, I faded back.

There were huge streams flying down the gutters during the entire race and every couple miles, there would be lakes that covered the entire street, like this.

There were also two sections where there were rivers - I'm not kidding here, these were 4-6 inch deep rivers flowing across the street. There was absolutely no way to get around them. You had to go right through them. If you were thinking right before you got to those rivers, "well, we can't get any wetter," you were wrong, weren't you?

Lots of good signs along the way, but my favorite was "Embrace the suck." I couldn't have put it any better.

I was having trouble meeting up with my support crew, Jen, but she finally found me at around mile 18. My quads were just trashed at that point - have I mentioned I didn't train for this race - and this series of photos is me telling her "no, I won't be finishing around 4:00, my quads are done." And her yelling, "But you're doing great, you've got a good time." And me yelling, "You don't understand, I'm done. Look for me at 4:30!"

And it turns out, that's exactly what happened. I totally seized up in the last six miles and was lucky to get across in 4:28:54.

And while Jen didn't get any shots of me in the first half of the race, when I actually looked like a normal runner, she did get me shambling across the finish line like a zombie.



The course itself was as advertised: up and down, but with gentle rollers and an overall downhill slant. I could see myself trying this one again...if I'm in shape...and the weather report is better.

So of course the sun came out at about noon and the rest of the day was positively beautiful. What are you going to do, right? Since we were flying back that night, and since our hotel wasn't allowing ANY late check-outs (and we couldn't get back there before noon), we found a local YMCA and I paid the day-use fee so I could take a shower!

Good race expo and great organization and volunteers there and at the race itself. Decent swag and a good looking black tech race tee. Also got some cotton gloves, a cinch backpack, a weird handband thing, and a big ass medal (B.A.M!), that you can apparently use as a coaster. It weighs about four pounds.

All in all, the race went as expected because I didn't have any expectations coming in. Being totally unprepared will do that to you.

But I'm not giving up. I'll roll my Boston goal to 2013 and I'll be back.

Next planned race: Corvallis Half Marathon in April. See you there.

credit for the opening video of the CIM to franzevna.