Reading Time: 3 minsCan I get a new PR!!
My previous PR was the 2013 Sarasota Half Marathon with a time of 1:56:37, so I beat that by just over a minute! At the end of the race I really didn’t even realize it was a PR, because I had zero intention of PRing and it was such a close time to what I ran at that Sarasota half.
Anyway, I’ve been looking forward to this race for a while now. For starters, I’m a massive space exploration geek and I’ve always heard how great the race is. What sucked is getting a severe respiratory infection about 8 days before this race! This is now my 3rd one of those within the past 3 years. It’s a good thing I was well trained, so it didn’t impact me as badly as it could have. I was planning to go all out for this race and was aiming for a 1:45 time initially.
The weather was a cool crisp 55 degrees in the morning, which is perfect weather in Florida to start a race. Knowing the second the sun makes an appearance it’ll only get warmer from there. Knowing I wasn’t at 100% I purposely wanted to start out slow and use the first 2/3 miles to properly warm up and from there try to run negative splits to the end. The game plan sounded solid to me and I figured I could still easily come in under 2 hours with this conservative plan.
After about a quarter of a mile I felt great and pretty much starting running at race pace. I averaged the first mile at 8:20 min/mile! Mile 3 was my slowest at 9:20 min/mile and my fastest was mile 12 at 7:40 min/mile. Pretty much after mile 6 I began to run a steady negative split race until the end. The very last 1/10 of a mile I really kicked it up and finished the 13.1 miles with a sprint where I average out a solid 7:18 min/mile. I ended up placing in 19th place out of 100 people in my age group and 279th overall. I believe the race cap for this race was 3,500 people for the half marathon, so 279th out of +3,400 people isn’t bad at all.
At the end of the day it was a great race not only because of my results, but my sister came down to run the race as well and my biggest fan and supporter (my mom) was also there!
I was extremely happy with my result of this race. I can’t wait until Best Damn Race in Safety Harbor where I think I can easily throw down a 1:45 time.
