A Big D. Named Appropriately.

Today was the Big D; also named the Texas Marathon, it's in Dallas. Therefore, the Big D.

 

Five of my running friends ran the marathon. I ran the half marathon.

 

I left home at 4am. Oh My! I drove and Wendy one of the marathon friends rode with me. As Doug said, we crossed a line into a new kind of crazy this morning. I could only agree. Wendy and I made good time and got to Dallas and Fair Park by the target 6:30am. The marathoners were starting at 7:30am and I would start at 8am.

 

Here we are before the race.

I got my friends off on their race, stood in line to go potty another time and then at 7:55 realized that I didn't have my head phones. So, I had a quick little warm up and jogged to the car and got them! Glad I was parked close by!

I crossed the start line at 8:03 with a handful of other runners. Let's just say I was at the back of the pack. I was back with the walkers and the jogging strollers. WHAT??? Jogging strollers? Those aren't allowed on this course. Or so the flyer said. Oh and what was that? A dog on a leash??? Really??

I started the race well. My first miles were right at my target pace  and I was doing fine. Then we hit the trail section going around the lake. I got stuck behind a pace group. ugh. The trail was too narrow to go around and it had a drop off so you couldn't run off the trail. When I did finally get past them, I didn't want to do my walk as I was afraid that I would get stuck again!

Then came the hill known as mile 6. It was crazy.

Overall, I have to say that the race was hard. Really hard. I heard some runners talking about the farthest distance they had run prior to the race. One guy said 6 miles. Ouch. I ran 17 on one run in Februrary in addition to regular weekend runs being between 10 and 14 miles every weekend from November through today. I was ready for this race. I had trained well and I felt good.  I can't imagine how those who didn't train made it through the race.

My impressions of this race are not favorable. I'm not planning on running this again. If it hadn't been for the Dallas PD at every intersection there wouldn't have been any spectators! There was no energy at all! And then there were the "others" on the course. We had to fight for space with bikes, walkers with dogs and random other runners going in the opposite direction.

My time was 2:15:10. The distance was 13.2 (.1 too long. But thankfully not nearly as long as the marathon. The marathon course was too long by more than a mile! How do you mess that up that much?)

I finished 1000 out of 1995 total runners and 69th out 190 runners in the 35 to 39 womens age group. It was by and far a younger and "fitter" race overall than other races that I had run.

 

 And the medal! Kinda fitting to me that it's a Big D!