Nike Women’s Half-Marathon, October 16, 2011

At the race start in Union Square

So I’m pretty smiley in this pre-race photo – especially considering I’m crazy anxious about the 21.1k I’m about to run in the Nike Women’s Half-marathon.

And I wish I could say the race went off without a hitch, but lots went wrong — setbacks that would normally frazzle me during a race:

• Bag check took a long time – meaning I started the race very late (18 minutes into the race), meaning I had to work through the crowds more than if I’d started in my proper corral
• One of my shoelaces untied, which has never happened to me before in a race, the precious seconds I lost retying, eek!
• I accidentally paused my interval timer on my watch without realizing it, which completely threw off my intervals for walk breaks (and even more important, I use the walk interval as a reminder to hydrate so my hydratio was off as well)
• The music on my iPhone would stop playing occasionally, ack!
• I only know kilometres, and the pace bunny signs were in miles, so I just felt confused overall.

And yet so many things were great about this race that they outweigh these things, such as:

• Hello? Tiffany & Co. medals??? Sweet.

• Firemen in tuxes presenting you these Tiffany medals? Even sweeter.

• Running my own race, essentially taking it easy and comfortably is much less stressful than my usual race experience.
• I finished in 2 hours and 8 minutes — which is much longer than my spring half-marathons, but not too shabby considering I didn’t really trained for the race. I can just decide to run a half now it seems and have a level of fitness that’ll get me through it. Wowzers.
• The incredible energy of being surrounded by 20,000+ fearless women running the race, the largest women’s race in the world

For more on how my race went, check out my post on thekit.ca!

2 Comments October 24, 2011