Sunday's NWM Half was pretty amazing. As my first race with 25,000 people between the half an full marathon distances it was incredible.
Not only was this my first race where Ryan wasn't also running, but with so many people I definitely had a few extra pre-race jitters! Since I was getting all nervous in the evening/morning of the race, I ended up not bringing my camera, like I had planned here. But, I did get a whole bunch of photos during the race and after with Ry waiting near the finish line!
Let me jump back a little before getting into the details of the race...packet pickup on Saturday was a little chaotic. The line to get in to the expo was wrapped around Union Square in downtown San Francisco almost twice! Luckly, it moved along pretty quickly, and the volunteers really were on top of things for the check-in process. Ryan came along with me. We didn't spend too much time inside, although it seemed like you could probably spend hours there if you wanted with giveaways, bra fittings, yurbuds headphones, Nuun samples and Neutrogena prettying people up. We did try out the Safeway trail mixes, and ran on the hamster wheel that was powering a cellphone charging station.
On the morning of the race, I got up just before 5 and headed over to the start around 6am. This was my first NWM experience, and overall I have to say that I think this year was pretty well organized. I had heard in the past that sometimes the pace corrals got a little crazy in the morning and some of the faster paced runners had to do a lot of weaving around slower paced runners. While there was a little of that going on, it wasn't anything too outrageous, and I didn't see any falls or injuries out of the starting gates.
The weather was also really nice this year -- the morning was overcast, not too warm or too cold. We had some fog along the beach so you couldn't see the Golden Gate Bridge, but it was still a beautiful day to be running.
With my training routine, I didn't fit in much time on hills, so I was a little nervous to see how I would fare. However, based on my performance at the Urban Cow Half last weekend, I was feeling generally positive about my training, and ready to race again this weekend! I ended up walking the water stations, and just a tiny bit of part of the hill at mile 6, but ran the rest of the race.Those hills are seriously tough!
My pace slowed down a bit near around mile 10, but I tried to keep my head in the game and keep pushing with a 5k left to the finish.
I finished in 2:00:36. Only 30 seconds slower than last week's race, which I think is pretty fantastic considering the difficulty of the course. My body definitely noticed a difference too, seeing as last week I wasn't that sore, and this week my quads are angry.
Even though it was a tough race, I am proud of myself for a strong finish and staying in it. It was incredible to run with so many women!
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