Urban Wildland Half Marathon

Wow! It has been a while. I have been trying to study like crazy. I take my written prelim exam in 1 week and my oral prelim exam in about 3 weeks. If I pass both of them, I am officially a doctoral candidate. Yippee!

I have been running a little. My hip and knee are bothering me some but I need to run to stay sane.

On to the race report:
The Urban Wildland Half Marathon is a great race! It is a green race, even the bibs are compostable. The bibs are imbedded with black eyed susan seeeds. Cool!!! I can't wait to plant mine. The race...I wasn't sure how it would go with my hip and not running much in July. I thought I would take it pretty easy, shoot for around 2 hours. Well, I started out and I was excited to be racing and I felt good. I passed the first 5k in 22:05...oops that was way too fast. But I was feeling so good so I thought maybe I will just go with it. At mile 4, my hips started giving me some trouble so I slowed down and continued to slow down for the next 6 miles. It was miserable to be running and to have blown up so badly. People were passing me left and right. I got to mile 11 and said to myself just go, get this race done with. Okay so I picked up the pace a little and started to pass people. I finished in 1:42:59. Better than I thought I would do.

Stats:
39/641 women
16/254 age group

The bib while a great idea, in practice it wasn't so great. It fell off around mile 4.5. I grabbed it because I really wanted to plant the seeds.

So I have a duathlon in a week. I have yet to ride my road bike this year and I probably won't ride it before the race. I commute to school by bike but it is only 3.5 miles a couple times a week. This is the extent of my bike training. The bike portion is 18 miles. I did bike 14 miles one day this summer but I don't think it counts because I stopped twice for ice cream and once for tacos during the ride. Should I ride my road bike or just use the commuter that I have been riding all year?

Back to studying...