The City of Oaks Half Marathon was a great race!  Perfect running weather and you can’t get any luckier than having it in your own back yard.  I came into this race fresh from having been battered and humbled by the American Tobacco Trail 10 Miler the previous weekend.  As usual, in the ATT race I started out overly ambitious to get a good time.  The result was an agonizingly slow second half. While it helped to realize afterwards from the elevation chart that the second half was 80% uphill, the lesson stuck:  Start Slow.

And so I did this time.  I started the race with Dot and we agreed that we were just there for the fun.  We would walk as needed and not even think about the time.  There was an unspoken agreement that ascending hills were to be walked and any scheduled walk breaks that occurred on a downhill were to be “banked” for later use.  This was perfect for Dot who was coming off an injury and for me, who was still paying homage to the angry “So You think You’re A Runner – Hah!” gods.  We had a very comfortable 10K to start and at that point I felt I had sufficiently atoned for my previous ebullience and was ready to open it up.  I waved “bye” to Dot and pushed on.

I was still all about running comfortably.  Instead of scheduled walk breaks I decided to walk whenever I felt the slightest need or wanted to eat/drink.  After all, the whole point of this race was to heal my relationship with running and I was ready cut myself a lot of slack to make this a good experience.   Surprisingly I found I didn’t want to walk often - only on the biggest hills was I tiring at all.  It was great to see my Galloway friends along the course cheering the racers on.  And the Galloway tent could not have come at a better time for me to shed my extra jackets as the day warmed up.  The last couple of miles were the best, as I comfortably chugged up all the hills without even wanting to walk.  Instead of feeling like the race would never end, I was wishing it would never end!  When the finish line was in sight I sprinted to the end.

I achieved the goal I wanted: to enjoy the race, feel comfortable and finish strong.  I thought a negative split would be a good indication of this and boy did I get it: my second half was run more than 1½ min per mile faster than the first!  And to top it off, I had a half marathon PR.  All for starting slow.  Lesson Learned.