Here is the little story of my run on Sunday in beautiful Prince Edward County...
Sunday was interesting. It turns out I'm fantastically stubborn and competitive. As this was my first long race I was profoundly unexperienced with how to manage myself in terms of pace and speed... and my new fangled GPS containing watch thingy has the data to prove it! I ran my first 6km in 30 mins on the button, and my first 10km in 53 mins... which is probs my fastest times ever for those distances. As you can imagine I started to feel like terrible shit around that point. My hip hurt, I was tired, and I wanted to stop and lie down in one of the beautiful corn fields. Instead I ate my tasty banana-strawberry gel, had some water and some gatorade, and slacked off on the pace a bit... This all helped and surprisingly the two hills around the 15km and 17km marks helped as well. I like running up hills. Its such a visible goal and when you get to the top all the sudden running on flat ground is easy again. I ended up heading back into the town of Picton feeling like I had a little bit left in my tank to have a nice finish... and at this point (19kms) I knew that I was going to beat my goal (2:15mins) by a long shot so that little seed of a dream that had been in the back of my mind for the entire race, "wouldn't it be cool to come in under two hours?!", began to grow. All the lovely Pictonites cheering on the sidewalks helped a lot too. So as I was saying, around 19km I started to giver again... My arms were kind of shaking and I was feeling a lot of pain in my hip and rather out of it but as I said I'm stubborn and kept running and started passing people I'd had in my sights for the past 2km or so. The problem started when I failed to see the 20km sign... I started to wonder... do I still have more than a km to go? Cuz if I do I need to pull back... but if I don't I can lay it all on the line or whatever. Well I didnt know so I started to pull back, people passed me, whateves... then all the sudden, there is the finish line! Fuck! So I start to "sprint" (I'm sure I wasn't really running all that fast, but ran as fast as I could muster), I saw the timer and it was like 1:59.... I saw Darren and he looked really excited and surprised to see me... and finished. Darren later got my time for me and I completed my very first half marathon in 2 hours and 5.8 seconds. I'm actually kind of annoyed that it wasn't under two hours hahaha... I mean... gah, so close. Next time I guess :)