Lake Lowell Half Marathon

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Nate and I ran our first half marathon last Saturday! I wasn't as prepared as I would have liked, with moving and school and working a few days a week. But we both did better than we'd anticipated and it was actually fun!
It was a little chilly, but we managed.
At the starting line they announced that they only had 140 medals show up so if you weren't one of the first 140 people you would have to get yours the next week.
As we were getting close to the halfway/turnaround point, I started counting the people coming back toward us to figure out how close we would be to getting a medal. Well we were right about 145ish so Nate said if he left me and ran ahead he could get a medal. I told him to go for it!
He took off at that point and after about a quarter mile he was out of my sight!
I kept my slow and steady pace and actually passed about 5 people.
At the second to last aid station I was still running which I didn't think I'd be doing! Right before the last 2 miles, we turned a corner and were running a different direction which was right into the wind and of course it started raining!
It made for a very slow finish (as it was also uphill!) but I kept running! I also started to feel a pain in my toe and was pretty sure I was bleeding but I was so close to being done that I just finished it out! I beat my estimated time (2:30) just barely but I was still happy with it!
I ended up 154 out of 240 with a time of 2:29:01. 16th in my age group out of 26.
Nate was 199 and his time was 2:15:33. 7th in his age group out of 11.
Overall, it was a fun race and I'm glad to be able to mark that off my list.
Nate thinks he wants to start training for a marathon now, someday I think that would be neat to do, but I think I want to do some more halves first:)

P.s. this is only the first picture we've seen from the "official race pictures" so I'm sure I'll add more once they post them.