Love Run: perfect weather, nice course, pretty good crowd support (it turns out I don't really like crowd support when I'm trying to run quote-unquote "fast" though).
1:58:25 on a negative split, which for me is
By way of comparison my half split for the full marathon in November was 2:22. The weather was SO MUCH WORSE then (oh god, so much worse) and I was trying to pace that run more conservatively, and also I basically hadn't slept or eaten anything in a week, but even so, I'm happy with this much improvement in four months. This wasn't even supposed to be my "real" spring half until a couple of weeks ago. Also, this time I didn't want to die in a portapotty for the last third of the race, so that's
too.
I started way back in the 2:30 corral based on my November time, also because I do the thing where I go "well, I'm really pretty slow, so I guess I should be... here?" and then I get there and remember that there are lots of people in the world who go slower than I do.
I forget this all the time because, between being extremely slow anyway and also being adamant about not running my easy days hard, I never pass anybody on my regular jogging trail. I always get passed. I get passed by literally everyone I encounter, to the point where if I manage to pass somebody, I immediately tell SVC about it when I get home because THAT NEVER HAPPENS.
But it turns out that the slowpoke corrals in big races are full of people who never use the jogging trails and that's why they're in the slowpoke corral.
Anyway, I ended up dodging and weaving around slower runners for the whole entire thing, and got jammed up in traffic repeatedly, which cost me at least 3 minutes (Garmin clocked my time to complete 13.1 miles as 1:55, but I ended up running 13.5 on the course because of detours to get around people). I'm not mad about it though because it is pretty encouraging to just pass people constantly for the whole entire race, and also I really just wanted to get sub-2 and I did that, so whatever, I'm not at the point where I care about 3 minutes' difference as long as I got my big goal.
I DID IT
I RAN AN ACTUALLY PRETTY OKAY TIME
WOOOOOOO
The overall winner of the whole entire race ran 1:07:37 and there was over a 2-minute gap between him and the next guy, so if Barthes Starr had been here he could probably have won the whole thing.