Tuesday, May 21, 2013

2013 Colfax Half Marathon - Denver - May 19 - Part 1 (Sorry It's Gotta Be in Phases)




Twas not a good day to be running.

At least not for me.  But it got done and it wasn't a PW.  I'm actually shocked.

This was by far the hardest half marathon course I have ever run.  Ever.

That's not to say that I wasn't trained OK enough...but I grossly underestimated the difference in elevation between where I live in Nebraska to the elevation there in Denver...they don't call it the Mile High city for nothing I can tell you that much.

Maybe I have figured out that its OK to not be so hard on ones self, and that times at any given race just aren't that darn important. Once I got injured in early 2012 and with the move, and all of that, I got tired of judging myself all the time and not celebrating the fact that I am soon to be 50 years old and I feel grateful that I can still do what I do.

Attitude is everything.  Shift from a place of its never enough to a place of I have everything I need.

In a way I am a bit disappointed but not terribly bad. A year or so ago, yeah, but again I didn't estimate the diff AND the fact that while this course is touted as flat, it's not. There were just little types at the beginning but man once you hit a certain spot in the course, its worse; at least for someone like me! It was like Central Park is but for the whole way it seemed.

And normally you think oh an uphill, I get a downhill? Nope. It would just flatten out before it started again.

The worse was once we turned to head back towards the finish, around mile 9; the sun had come out and it was hot.

It would have been so much better if the skies had stayed cloudy! It was warm at the start...55ish I guess...

Jeez that's a whole lot of nothing; random thoughts put together to form a blog post?  I think not...

Let's start over...

**********************************

As in let's start back at the beginning shall we??  (Note:  due to time I am going to have to split this thing up into sections; otherwise no one may ever know about the race :O)

I had booked a hotel 'close' to the Start/Finish, and while it WAS close, it wasn't as close as I thought.  So that morning after 2 cups of coffee and a Pop Tart, I headed out. 

To walk to the Start.  I left about 10 min to 6 and the race (half) started at 7 (the full started at 6).  Based on where I thought I was in connection to the Start, I figured this gave me plenty of time to get there, potty and get in my corral.

 Wrong. 
Wrong.
Wrong.

As I was walking along I could hear the hoopla off in the distance and it kept me thinking 'Oh I'm close'.

Wrong again.

I could hear the makings out of the Star Spangled Banner and then the gun signaling the Start of the marathon.

Kept walking.

Then after a while I started to think I had somehow missed the turn.  There was only one so I was confused.  Maybe the locals knew one street as being named something else?  Finally I saw a lady sitting on her porch and asked her. 

Nope still had a ways.  I looked at my Garmin. 
It was almost 6:30.

Shit fire.
To make a long story short instead of the other way around, I ended up walking 2.5 miles BEFORE the actual race.

I got there with barely enough time to stand in the lines to potty.  I knew that each corral was about 1.5 min apart and I was in G.

I just made it.  I didn't actually make it to G since getting through the crowd was hard without making anyone mad but I did make it to H.  :O)

In the back of my mind I was concerned about the long walk there beforehand but figured, eh it would be OK.  And of course I had brought my debit card with me to use for a cab after...

To be continued...






4 comments:

Becka said...

I also started in H for the half, maybe I saw you!

Junie B said...

Becka, I wondered about that as well. I saw on Twitter and your race recap on your blog that you finished shortly after I did (6 min or so), so there was probably times if not at the very beginning where we could have been right next to each other.

Karen Seal said...

Oh my goodness...what a stressful start! And yuck for elevation!!

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