Martian half marathon race report

The good news: I set a PR at the Martian half marathon this morning.

The bad news: Actually, there is no bad news. I SET A PR! Hehehe.

The official results aren't posted yet. If my Garmin is at all correct, then I beat my previous half marathon time by about 12 minutes. YEAH! (Edited to add: results are in and I set a PR by 12:37. Wooo!)

I don't know what else to write about. The race started at 7am. I arrived at about 6:30 and went into the building where late packet pickup was happening because it was warmer in there and they had real toilets. :) Temperature was in the low 30s at the start and around 40 at the finish, so it wasn't too bad. My hands were cold the whole race so I kept my gloves on. But then my hands are almost always cold, so that's no surprise.

As my friend Wendy predicted, my nerves settled down as soon as the race started. I think there were around 4,000 people registered, nearly all of them for the half and very few for the full. The race route was along the roads in Dearborn, MI (home of Ford Motor Company). The majority of the route was along one long road that goes through a number of parks, so there were lots of flush toilets along the route. Why am I so focused on the toilets? I don't know, but porta potties are gross so real toilets are appreciated.

The weather was mostly cloudy but the sun peeked out from time to time. It's hard to believe we're supposed to get three inches of snow tonight.

Even though I knew quite a few people who were running the race, I never saw any of them. It felt like the miles were going by pretty quickly and I felt quite good through most of the race. The course was mainly flat but there were a couple of killer hills which fortunately were very short. I'm proud to report that, aside for stopping at a couple of water stations, I ran the whole way. (That's different than my last half, where I took a few walk breaks in the later miles.) When I got to mile 12 I started getting pretty excited. And also had some weird and horrible abdominal cramping which fortunately disappeared after a few minutes.

I was really happy to see the finish line up ahead and I have no idea how the hell I'm going to run a full marathon in October. After I finished, I headed for the food tent and promptly ate three giant chocolate chip cookies. Yum!