Half-Mary here I come

In my random driving around today I decided on which half I’m going to do.  After looking at my options (all two of them: Philly and Outer Banks), I’m going with Philly’s Half.  It will be a shorter drive, and a bigger race, which I find more fun most of the time.  I went ahead and gave away some more money to the Race Gods tonight, so I’m all signed up and ready to go.

One little thing I haven’t yet figured out is where I’m going to stay the night before.  When I went up to Pennsylvania earlier this summer for the Steelman Tri I simply just camped at a nearby campground (us Seattle-ites swing that way).  But given this time of year will (hopefully) be much cooler, I’m not so down with that.  I did enough winter camping as a kid; thank you very much.  So if anyone has any recommendations for quick and easy (and relatively cheap) places, let me know.  I guess if I was really organized I’d try and see if I could use any of my Hilton or Marriott points anywhere.

Now…the real question is a matter of whether or not I can knock out the required 1:23:00.  Actually, the better question is one of whether or not I collapse along the way trying.  To be clear, I think that 1:23:00 is doable – it’s just whether or not I do it that weekend.  But I figure either way, I’ll go for a solid PR.  And have fun doing it.

Half fun running until one might collapse you say?  You see – I enjoy the half-marathon distance.  It’s probably my favorite running distance.  I don’t particularly enjoy the marathon distance (despite doing one next weekend), it’s just too much mental aerobics for my brain.  Even if you ‘take one mile down, pass it around’, there’s still 25.2 miles of pain left up on the wall.  While my body can do the distance, my brain hates it.  With the half, it’s over in under two hours, and you can go onto have a normal remainder of the day.  With the marathon you limp around like a gimp duck missing one foot for a few days, all while having a strange smiling grimace on your face (and still wearing the official t-shirt three days later).

Anyway’s, on unrelated notes…  The swim yesterday (Friday) with the DC Tri Club went well.  This was my first interaction with them as a club.  The workout was nicely put together and included much more focus on sets then I usually do in my own swim workouts.  My swim workouts have more or less degraded into just swimming all of the laps required in 1-2 straight shots, probably not helping my speed or form too much.  They included 150 yds of kick.  My legs were burning after that!  Not very friendly of them I say.

I ended up going out again this morning with them for a brick-n-picnic in Rock Creek Park, which was fun.  The weather was also a perfect fall day, probably got to the low 70’s and mostly sunny.  Fairly casual and easy brick – sorta a nice ride & run in the park.  Tomorrow I’ve got my final ‘long run’ for next week’s Marathon.  Although I don’t think I can really call 8 miles a ‘long run’, given that’s my usual mid-week longer run distance.  But it should be a good time, going out with a few of the guys that I’ll be running with next weekend during the race.  After which I have to drop off my car to get it’s semi-flat tire fixed/replaced, but I’ll take that 90-120 minutes as an opportunity to either go for a bike ride somewhere or bike to the pool and then bike back after getting in my swim.

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