What a nice weekend on the 12th. I went down to Ft. Lauderdale for the RRM conference. Always a nice get away as I was able to sit on the beach and swim in 80 degree weather while everyone else in Michigan was experiencing the first snow…don’t hate 🙂 Work was good and it was nice getting some relaxing time with the wife.

I needed to do a long run while I was down there and not knowing the area I began to look for road races and the 13.1 is what I found. So this was cool…I had never run a half before and I wanted an official time. I didn’t really care what the time was as long as I could finally say “My time is blah” but then I started looking at the results from the past year, as we all do, and then I fond the course record of 72:40 (5:33 pace.) I had just finished up a 10 miler at 5:24 pace so I thought here is one more goal I can accomplish while I’m down here.

I sent in my running resume and was able to bypass the $85 reg. fee. but I still had to go through Active.com which pained me being that I run a competing website “RunSignUp”.

Two worst things about the race was I had to get up at 4:00am for the 6:15 start and there was a 15-20 mph head wind for 7 miles…now for the fun stuff.

As the news paper described it “It was a brisk 69 degrees” so I was warming up in just a racing singlet and shorts. The race director called me out at the start line and was asking me for my prediction which I just shrugged and said we will see.

Runners take your mark…everyone moved and boxed me out pushing me back to the second row…that is so annoying. As usual we start at a blistering 4:30 mile pace eventually slowing to a 5:10 for the first mile, I sit in 10th place. These guys continue to hammer the pace through the second mile dropping a 5:04. Now I want to qualify for the Olympic Trials in the half marathon just as much as the next guy but I was in realty knowing I’m not in that good of shape, so I slowed down and dropped a 5:34 Mile. Weird…I still ended up in 2nd place after that mile. I made a small push over the fourth mile at 5:18 catching up to 1st place where we ran together for about 200 meters then he just slowed way down as I hit my fifth mile in 5:20 and was on my own for the rest of the race. 5:10, 5:04, 5:34, 5:18, 5:20, 5:24, 5:35, 5:25, 5:08, 5:23, 5:05, 5:17, 5:17.

Ready to be done with this at the 11th mile and tried to push a little harder to get it over with in a time of 69:34 smashing the course record by 3:06 and beating 2nd place by almost 4 minutes.

All in all it was a fun experience and I couldn’t ask for a better first half marathon. In Detroit I may be the slowest ever but down there I was the fastest ever 🙂 and I am still amazed how a beer can make your legs feel so much better after a hard run like that.