On Saturday, Stephanie and I ran our first half marathon. It was great to run with her. It was great to finish. But I have a lot of miscellaneous feelings related to it, let me share them.
According to Wikianswers.com less than .2% of all Americans finished a half marathon in 2007. That's a rather exclusive group and I'm proud to be a part of it.
Steph and I finished 3rd and 4th place... from the last. So, I'm very humbled by our place in this exclusive group.
Will I do it again... not anytime soon. I'm not saying "no" but I need to change my training plan before I'm going to take this one again. I trained for a total of 388 days before this and I still went so slow. Our times of 2:48:24.3 (Steph) and 2:48:24.2 (me, I beat her by .1 seconds, ha ha) put us at a pace of 12:85 min/mile or 4.66 mph. I'm slow, but I'm not personally happy with that time. (I think I could knock 12 minutes off that pace with a different diet plan. I celebrated the presence of 3 porta-potties along the way. That's a training issue I have to study up on and put into practice.) Even taking off the 12 minutes that would put our pace at 11:94, which is far above my goal. So, while I'm very proud to have finished, I'm going to work on getting my pace up before I try anything close to this again.
The run was beautiful. I recommend Shawnee Mission Park to anyone who wants to bike ride or run. The trails were wonderful.
I thoroughly enjoyed running with my daughter. It was a daddy/daughter dance of sorts and I'm glad we got to share in that moment (or moment plus 2 hours and 45 minutes.)
The run started with about 1 1/2 mile 2% grade downhill. That was easy running. It moved down to a very scenic valley where we ran on fairly flat land for about 4 miles. There was a gentle upward slope for about a half mile and then a climb for the next half mile before we turned around and did the whole thing in reverse. For those of you not keeping score, that means that we had 1 1/2 miles of uphill climb at the end of the race. This was an insult to my whole body.
Steph and I decided that we weren't quite ready to run a race like this so we implemented a plan I've seen on many training websites. We ran 10 minutes and walked 2. We alternated this pace for the whole race until we hit that last two miles. Once we started that upward climb at the end, the plan went out the window. We opted to run the flats and scarce downhills and walk the uphills. That really slowed our pace considerably. The last couple hundred yards were especially rough as they were up a fairly steep hill.
Coming to the last 50 yards I grabbed Steph's hand and pulled her to a jogging pace. We were both whooped, but I wanted to finish strong and she was dragging behind. So I grabbed her hand and began to run, not jog, run. We finished strong. There was a second in there that I thought I'd cry, but I didn't. Still it was rather emotional to think that Steph and I had succeeded at a year long quest (it was way more than just a goal, it was a quest) to do what I would have denied having the ability to do.
Now, to go soak my very soar right foot. Hope it's not a stress fracture, my body is telling me it's ready to run some more.
By the way, take a look that the previous post. We're going to put together "Team Shepherd." We'll have shirts and we'll gather monthly at a 5K to run, walk, or jog to support some good causes and to get healthy. I'm excited at the number of people who are interested in becoming a part of this.
Now, on your mark, get set, GO..........
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