Half Marathon

Sunday morning Trisha (my running partner) and I ran the Girlfriends Half Marathon in Vancouver, WA. This was a GREAT event, for a number of reasons.

Before every race, we talk about whether or not we want to run for a good finish time or just for fun. We normally settle on just having fun and if we beat out time, excellent! Same thing with this event. For me, it's two weeks after the Portland Marathon and for Trisha, it's her longest run for a couple of months so we both had potential handicaps going into the event.

The event was promoted for only women and advertised having cute men (who ended up being firefighters) hand out chocolates and food at the end, as well as a gift from a local jeweler. We didn't really pay too much attention to all of that when signing up, but it turned out to be pretty neat.

This was the first year for this event and they were very excited to get 400 participants. Both Trisha and I have done very small events before and didn't have very good experiences so were glad this wasn't shaping up to be one of those.

As it turned out, the run was GREAT!! We did a personal best of 2:17 and some seconds (see my previous post for other half marathon finish times). Although, shaving about 7 minutes off our previous time seems almost too good to be true so I'm almost wondering if the course wasn't measured correctly. But either way, we both did well and felt pretty good, only walking a couple times. It was a low key event with great weather! And as promised, there were men passing out chocolates, little charm necklaces (see picture) and water and other snacks at the finish.

And as an added surprise, I had a voicemail message from Mark when I finished, telling me how proud he was of me!! That was really neat because I love how supportive he is of my running and really missed having him there to cheer me on.

You can view our finisher pics here.

It was really neat to do this race with Trisha and run well and at a good pace. It was our last race of the season and really felt like a great finish to a really good running year! Another thing that was neat about this race is that the 13.1 miles carried me over 703 miles so far in 2007. 702 was my total mileage for all of 2006, which is something I had hoped to do, beat my distance for last year. So that was awesome!