AT&T Half Marathon Results

OK, Troy, here ya go:

Sunday, Feb17, I completed my first half marathon. Yes, I finished it. Did I have the greatest run ever? Not exactly. But I finished. And I did finish running, though in a bit of pain. OK, actually, a lot of pain. Enough of the sputtered sentence fragments already, here's the details...

I was ready. I thought so anyway. I had done the long runs, and I could keep my goal pace. And it wasn't even an extremely fast goal pace. 10 min miles, that's it. We (Doug and I) started along with the other 13,000 people going across the river on Congress. It was quite the view, really. Way too many people up and running in one place on a Sunday morning.

I'm going to do a quick cut-and-paste from an email I wrote right after the race, which captured my feelings and my story:

Thursday I ran and my right leg kinda hurt afterward. It got better each day and was feeling fine on Sunday morning. Within the first mile, it started hurting again (almost tripped me up a few times), but it got better, so I thought maybe I just needed to warm up. It was nagging me from then on and I decided to walk a bit somewhere in mile 8. About 10 steps into my walking, my right leg/knee just about exploded in pain (I almost cried). I said almost; I’m a man, I’m 40.

Anyway, I sent my brother on to finish his race and was going to walk to the aid station and get a ride to the end or something. Well they gave me an ace bandage, and while that really didn’t help at all, I decided to continue walking. Somewhere in here, I remembered the verse I had read that morning, Heb 12:1, and I decided this was my race to run with endurance, so I finished it. After punch-dancing out my rage and suffering an extremely long and very painful fall, I realized what had to be done. I couldn’t just walk across the finish line (that would suck), so I started running for the last 2 blocks. It hurt, a lot, but I finished it running…

So, that's the end of my recycled summary. My time was 2:45:45. Not spectacular and I finished somewhere near dead last for my age group, but I did get the medal and the finishers T-shirt.

Since the race, I think I've isolated the source of my pain. It wasn't my knee, as in a joint problem, but my hamstring; or at least the lower tendon connected to my hamstring. I am going to work on strengthening that muscle and just running very carefully to make sure I'm healthy before I go running again.

You may ask "Gee Paul, are you gonna try it again?" Unfortunately, my bus route in the morning goes along part of the route, so I'm constantly haunted by the memory and taunted by the cold, cruel pavement. I think I have to try it again. It is my destiny. Maybe a solo effort or maybe at next years event. Either way, I need to finish it strong.


Unfortunately, I've worked in some movie and/or youtube quotes in this post. If you're not familiar with Hot Rod and Mike Gundy, it may not make sense. I don't apologize for my actions, but I do think they are funny. ha ha