After a late scratch from the MCM caused by a bum knee, I decided to run the OBX half marathon as a "warm-up" and "check-the-knee" race in preparation for my next race, the CIM marathon in Sacramento, December 8th.

I did the OBX half two years ago and that was my last race I did without taking walk breaks. The combination of no walk breaks and the bridge at mile 9 had its expected effects on that race, so I looked forward to a chance to improve my time considerably.

After a slightly chaotic registration (online registration closed a day earlier than expected, so I had register at the expo) and packet pick-up, I drove up to Duck and spent the night eating Greek pizza and talking runner trash with some Galloway Alumni.

On the morning of the race I met up with Dale and Jay from the Wanna Beasts group, and when we approached the start line we were spotted by Brian from our group and his neighbor Keith.

I hadn't run more than a mile in four weeks because of my knee injury and a rather persistent cold, so my original plan was to run 11:30 miles, but the group wanted to run 11:00 miles so I volunteered to pace our 5-man team until we passed the bridge and then we would see how things worked out.

The start was pretty smooth thanks to the different starting groups being separated by a couple of minutes at the start. We quickly found our pace and followed the walk break strategy rigorously. There's really not much to mention about the first 8 miles except for the stripper music we provided when Keith removed his plastic bag 'jacket' (the ladies kept telling him to remove more...), but the real fun started when we went over the bridge...

Jay decided to speed after the bridge and after a while Dale also pulled away from me during the last couple of miles. I had been doing pretty well up until this point, but the lack of training was starting to take its toll. That didn't stop me from speeding up the last couple of miles and I passed well over a hundred people according to the split times. I guess it's a good thing when you can run the last three miles a whole minute faster than the previous pace, but perhaps I was holding back too much from the beginning?

The knee held up pretty well and I improved my time by twenty minutes compared to two years ago.

After the race we enjoyed the sun, the beer, and the Manteo harbor.

The Raleigh race may be nice, but it's be hard to compete with the OBX race. Not only is the OBX course much easier (especially when you compare the full marathon courses), but the arrangements surrounding it is better. The race was very well organized and I especially appreciated the start arrangements. The only downsides were the Gatorade that was WAY too strong and that they messed up my last name.

"Speaker - Approaching the finish line: Daniel ELK"...