Training-the final result!

Today was the day! This morning, I ran my first half-marathon: The City of Oaks Half Marathon in Raleigh. My day started at approximately 4:45am, when my alarm rang. I got up, got dressed, ate a light breakfast consisting of a cereal bar and a glass of orange juice. I left my house at about 5:15am to drive to Raleigh. The race organizers recommended that we get to the race an hour before the start so that we could find places to park and such. So anyway, as I was driving down I-40 this morning in pitch black, I was thinking, "Some part of me must be crazy to be driving to a road race before dawn on a Sunday morning!" But I guess that's part of being a runner!

The race started at 7am by the Fairgrounds. It was a really pretty morning; sunny, cool, and crisp. The race took us through downtown Raleigh, past NC State, and over by Meredith College, looping around other parts of Raleigh that I'm not familiar with, and we ended back where we started. I was feeling great throughout the whole race, and my official race time was 1:50:37, which is a pace of 8:27. My goal time was somewhere in the vicinity of 2 hours, so I definitely met my goal, and I feel like I did better than I thought I would. So I am really happy with the result of my first half marathon. I can definitely say that I want to do this again next year. I will be honest though; my legs are really sore, and I think I may be feeling this for a few days!

As all of you know who have been reading my blog, I started my half marathon training 16 weeks ago. Very auspiciously, Runnersworld.com launched a free online training log at about the same time, which I have used to record every workout. In the past 16 weeks, I have run a total of 503.6 miles. In addition to completing my overall goal of running a half-marathon, I have improved my training run pace, and set a new PR for my 10K race time. My next goals are to keep improving my pace and to run some more 10K races and do the half-marathon again next year!