I participated in my 4th Half-Marathon this past Saturday, Sept. 1, 2012. It was the Women's Half-Marathon in Indianapolis. This is the first out of town race I have done. Friday night when I went to bed I was expecting to wake up to rain from hurricaine Isaac, but to my surprise the rain held off and we were able to complete the whole race with no rain!
My training began at the end of May and continued through the summer. Instead of training with a group like I have done in the past all of my training was done independently. I was worried about keeping myself motivated, but it really wasn't as hard as I thought. The one drawback of not training with a group is that I didn't push myself to keep up with anyone so I found that my mile times were slower than in the past.
My goal is always just to finish the race and I did, barely :-) My legs started to give out on me after mile 8 and once I got to mile 10 they were pretty much numb so I had to walk the last 3 miles which really added on to my time. So I finished in 3 hours and 8 minutes. I am still quite proud of myself and would never have dreamed I would compete in 4 half-marathons!!
I plan on taking a break from half-marathons because the training is so intense. My goal is to keep running and participate in some 5K races.
Here is my after race picture - I couldn't even stand up at this point!
