SOUTHERN UTAH HALF MARATHON
Amy and I went down to St George to run the Southern Utah Half Marathon this weekend. I didn't really have any time goals in mind. This is by far the most mileage I've done in a week leading into a race and I had a pretty big workout on Wednesday, so I didn't really expect anything special.
The temperature was great, but the wind was coming pretty strong from the Southwest and which direction did our race head in? Southwest! Everyone talked about how it would be a headwind for 13.1 miles, but in reality it wasn't quite that bad, it was only like 12.5 miles of headwind ;)
The race started and there was a kid from Las Vegas that took to the lead immediately. I caught up to him and we ran side by side for 4.5 miles. The first 3 miles of the race are very downhill. Last year I bombed down those and it made the rest of the race pretty miserable. So this year I went conservative, about 40 seconds slower this year for those three miles.
Around 4.5 miles into the race the other guy dropped back a bit so I surged up a small hill to get a gap. From there the gap increased and I was able to run pretty strong to the end. The wind slowed things down a bit (it seemed strongest in miles 1-3 and 10-13), but the result was still pretty good and I am happy that I was able to run so well off of the high mileage and the big workouts. After the race, I waited to watch Amy finish and it was the highlight of the morning seeing her win! I was so proud of her, just awesome.
Huge shoutout to Steve Hooper and his team at St George Running Center for putting on another great race. If you guys haven't run this race yet, you're missing out!
Splits: 5:00 5:03 4:57 5:16 5:03 5:11 5:04 5:07 5:09 5:08 5:13 5:19 5:11 and 5:11 pace for the end.
|