It was a beautiful cool, calm and sunny morning for the Woodbury Half marathon - 48 degrees at the start. Best race weather all year! The course gave us a tour around Woodbury's 5 primary lakes, mostly on paved trails. Very beautiful homes and area but hard to enjoy during a race. It was a very tough course with many short, steep hills - very disruptive while trying to maintain a rhythm/pace. I'm glad I didn't realize the number of hills the course has or I would have been thinking about them the entire race. My legs were spent by the time I made it over the last couple. One hill in particular was followed by a sharp left hairpin turn and I thought I was going to tumble into the woods for a second. I finished in 1:31:27 shaving another 29 seconds off my personal best from 3 weeks ago - my 4th consecutive PR in half marathons this season! I finished 27th overall among 399 runners and 3rd of 25 in my age group.
I have two more races before the New York City Marathon. A 20 mile race September 12th in White Bear Lake, and a 10k race October 3rd in Downtown St Paul (one of the Twin Cities Marathon weekend races).
In May I talked about a goal of mine to run a sub 90 minute half marathon some day. At the time I still had two and a half minutes to chop off my time to reach this goal. I was was able to chop off one minute between my last two races but still have 90 seconds to go. Since this was my last half marathon this year I will now need to wait until next year and achieve this goal at the age of 53!
http://www.onlineraceresults.com/race/view_race.php?race_id=11849&relist_record_type=result&lower_bound=0&upper_bound=399&use_previous_sql=1&group_by=default#racetop
You'll for sure do a 90 minute half marathon someday! When you look at how far you've come and how much you've accomplished, that last minute and a half is nothing!
ReplyDeleteAmazing run. You are doing great!!!
ReplyDeletezbsports