My First Half!!!

I did it!

Here's my bib that I picked up on Friday at the expo. It's the first one I've gotten that has my name on it. I'm pretty sure that it means that I have entered into the big leagues of racing.

The race started at 6am and this is what the view looked liked from outside of my hotel room when I got up. Do you see that glare? That my friends, is rain. Not the best of circumstances if you are going to run your first half, but I just layered a lot and tried not to think about it.

Here are my friends Randi, Chrissy and Shannon at the start of the race.

The course was pretty flat overall and took us around the Denver area.

I'm not going to lie. It was hard and far! The longest run I had done in my training was 11 miles and I was hurting a lot at the end. The best part about the route was after mile 7 when we got to run through a fire station. It really helped motivate me to go faster. While I had a stretch goal of coming in under 2 hours, I knew that coming in under 2:05 was going to be hard for me, so throughout the race I pushed myself to run 9:40m/m or under. I was able to do that for all but four of the miles and I came in just under the 2:05 mark!!
Here we are at the end of the chute that leads out of the finish! I am so proud of us for running our first half!

Now for the results! I did end up running .09 miles more than I had too, but all in all, I am really happy with my numbers. My splits from my garmin looked like this:

Split    Time     Distance    Avg Pace
   1       09:32        1.00           09:32
   2       09:28        1.00           09:28
   3       08:57        1.00           08:57
   4       09:21        1.00           09:21
   5       09:01        1.00           09:01
   6       09:14        1.00           09:14
   7       09:44        1.00           09:44
   8       09:27        1.00           09:27
   9       09:47        1.00           09:47
   10     09:49        1.00           09:49
   11     09:18        1.00           09:18
   12     09:19        1.00           09:19
   13     09:49        1.00           09:49
   14     01:52        0.19           09:39
Sum  2:04:46      13.19          09:27

My official time was 2:04:42 and I had an average pace of 9:32!!
Overall: 1385/3779
20-29F Div: 227/774
Females: 650/2409

My muscles are so sore tonight and I am super exhausted because I didn't sleep very well last night. But I've taken it easy today and had my fair share of Advil today and hopefully tomorrow I'll feel closer to 100%. Now I'm off to bed :)