Madison Marathon - HALF!

Saturday: I am running the Madison Marathon Half Marathon tomorrow morning. The weather had been pretty nice all week. Thursday was extremely windy and warm, but still nice. Back in 2000 when I ran my one and only Marathon, this is the race I chose (albeit organized by a different group). Back then, the temp's were in the low 60's.
The weather forecasters have been taking about the extreme high temp's expected for Sunday all week long. Today we may have hit 73 degrees . . . Maybe! But tomorrow WeatherChannel is predicting a high of 95 degrees. Simple math - that is over 20 degrees higher plus high humidity for tomorrows race. The race organizer have been talking about the possibility of canceling the Full Marathon all week and Friday afternoon made the call. Lucky for me the Half was still on. ;-)

Written Saturday evening - but not posted.

Sunday AM - up at 4:45. Ate my standard breakfast of steel cut oats, with berries and coffee. Got ready and headed downtown. I was meeting up with Jamie, of Running Diva Mom, HERE and Amy, of Running is Cheaper than Therapy, HERE before the start of the race. They were both registered for the Full, but opted to run the Half after the Full was cancelled. We met up, chatted and took a pic.


Jamie, Amy and me. ;-)

Jamie and Amy headed back to their car to drop off and pick up stuff and I headed to bag drop off. We met back up and headed to the porta potties and waited and waited. We waited in the queue that appeared to feed all of the individual lines for quite awhile like good patient race participants and finally decided to walk forward to one of the individual pottie lines and after about 10 minutes finally hit the potties. As soon as we walked the 1/2 block to the Square, the National Anthem was being sung. Hugs with Amy and Jamie. Since they are faster than me, they moved forward, and although I really wanted to run with them - I wanted to run MY race and make sure that I did NOT go out too fast, so I elected to stay put. It took about 6 minutes to hit the start line.
Since all marathoners were automatically registered for the Half, it was a full race, 4,390 runners. The start of the race was crowded and even I had to do a lot of weaving to push past the 3:05, 2:30 and 2:20 pace groups. I settled in near the 2:20 pace group, figuring I could push at the end, if I had anything left!
Much of the course covered the route I bike to work - so it was fun to run through familiar neighborhoods.
Lucky for us the overcast skies remained until around mile 8, this kept the temp's controlled and I did not miss the sun one bit. Of course when the sun did come out we were done running through the tree lined neighborhoods and were headed to an out and back on a local causeway, with no shade!
I kept telling myself to just slow down and keep going. I walked through most water stops and filled up my handheld. About at mile 11.5 I did give in to weary legs and walked for a little, but quickly picked up the pace ( that is a relative term) again and headed towards mile 12. Of course the last 1/2 mile was up hill! I finished at 2:16, for a pace of 10:26.
Here are my splits:
1. 10:00
2. 10:09
3. 9:53
4. 10:22
5. 10:25
6. 10:15
7. 10:17
8. 10:35
9. 10.24
10. 10:15
11. 10.53
12. 10:52
13. 1.28

Clearly a major slow down after mile 7, but that is also when the sun came out! This was good enough for 10th out of 45 in my age group!

I headed back to a spot where we had decided to meet up after the race, and actually ran into Jamie and Amy walking to our meet up spot. Amy ran in, 1:46 and Jamie ran in 2:00.
We walked down to a Cupcake store on State St. and I enjoyed a 'Not so Thin Mint' cupcake and it was GOOD!


Next week is the Komen 5k and THEN the following weekend I will get to spend 36 hours in a van with these two wonderful women 'cause we are running the Ragnar Madison to Chicago relay. We have an awesome team, The Panty Raiders and it is going to be a BLAST - I can not wait!
Until my next post, PEACE and Enjoy the moments!

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