Three words encompass our whole morning: HOT, WINDY, and FUN.
I started running in 2011 when I was a senior in high school. My first half marathon was in 2014. I was signed up to do the long leg of the marathon relay last year, but my team captain decided to back out the night before the race, so I didn’t get to do the half last year.
My husband grew up a swimmer and hated running. He saw it as a punishment in soccer. He had never done a race before our half marathon and only started running for the first time in November 2015. Like never ran more than 2 miles before that.
Yesterday he became a half marathoner and I am incredibly proud of him!
We live about 20 miles outside of OKC, so we just stayed at home the night before. It would’ve been nice to stay downtown and literally just wakeup and go out to the race, but it was definitely a benefit getting to sleep in our own bed.
The race started at 6:30 and had a memorial service at 5:30, so our alarms went off at 4 am, which absolutely came too soon despite my 8 pm bedtime. I didn’t sleep great because I was so excited, but I didn’t necessarily feel tired when I got out of bed.
As someone who doesn’t eat many carbs on a day to day basis, it was kinda hard to start leading up to the race. The goal was to eat a steady stream of carbs in the last three days beforehand. For me, this came in the form of eating more crackers and bread with my usual low carb meals.
The weather was set to be around 62 at the start with clear skies and increasing cloud cover. Well. The actual weather ended up being around 72 at the start and clear sunny, hot, and humid. I still went with wearing capris because I HATE having chafe on my legs and am just more comfortable in running capris. My pants are actually from Victoria’s Secret, as was my sports bra. As someone who was a loyal Nike follower, I was surprised when I first got these to find how comfortable they were. My top was a simple Under Armor tee. Jay went with an easy breezy outfit of Nike Pros, shorts, and a Nike Dri-fit.
This was also my first race wearing a flip belt. I am going to be doing a full write up on it, but I will just leave it here that I LOVED IT. Some people go on and on about how great they are and I just thought they were crazy, but it really was amazing.
We had to park about a mile from the OKC Memorial, so our warm up was really just a light jog/walk over from the parking garage. We felt pretty good by the time we got over to the corral.
Lets back up to around mid March. I hurt my shin during training and did not think I was going to run the race at all. I had to take almost four weeks off of running period and focused on the elliptical so I would not develop a stress fracture. What made me go for it anyways?
- I really wanted to share this experiece with Jay. I was the one who talked him into it and I knew that it would be way better for him if I ran with him.
- My grandpa passed away at the beginning of March. I was incredibly close with him and he would call me every week and check up on how training was going. Seeing how proud he was of me during my last half and through training for this one is what really motivated me to suck it up and run the race despite not being as trained as I wanted to be.
So, aimed with my Honey Stinger gummies, I was ready to knock this race out for the memory of my grandfather and the lives lost in the 1995 bombing, not to beat a PR.
Our official race results put us at 3:25.42. Our runkeeper results, paused during bathroom breaks and standing in line for the port-a-potties, has us at 2:52:47, which out us around 13 min/mile. Obviously, for some runners this time is pretty abismal, but seeing how proud Jay was when he received his medal and already talking about our next half and when we are going to do a full marathon less than 10 minutes after the finish made every second matter.
For our next race, a couple of things we will work on: NOT GETTING HURT. I will say 100% that this was the single most contributing factor to our less than great performance. I think that for now, we are going to focus on building a base that we are extremely comfortable with and then for actual training for the next half marathon, we are going to go with a longer training plan that would accommodate possible injury weeks and increase slower.
We will also be running more hills. The OKC Marathon has a crazy number of hills on the course. Our town literally has maybe one hill and it is an overpass on the highway. So, training runs in different areas with more hills will definitely be in order.
Overall, we had a blast. We were able to take it easy and enjoy ourselves and my hubby is now a half marathoner!
The Grider Wifestyle 