Surf City Half Marathon - The Report

Mary got a cool photo of Bret Michaels

As a triathlete, It's hard to write a race report about a running race because there is only one sport to talk about.  Specifically, there is no swim, and the swim is always good for at least one solid paragraph of self deprecation.  But today it doesn't matter, because the cool story has little to do with my race.

Rather, it starts Friday when TRI714 picked me up and we headed down to the race expo to pick up our race numbers.  Craig is also a member of OC Velo, so it was nice to get a chance to hang out with him lycra free.  Craig ran the half marathon.  After the race he told me he had some trouble with blistering and thus finished a little slower than he had hoped.  But I guarantee he finished with his head up high, because that's the kind of guy he is.  Good job, Craig.

Saturday I went back to the expo, this time to meet up with Racing Dawn and Chris K.  I'd never met Dawn, online or otherwise, until yesterday.  Dawn's got a cool story - she's been running a marathon a month, and had flown in from Salt Lake City with her husband to bag another one.  She finished in 4:25...how awesome is that?

After coming off an injury, Chris K chose Surf City to qualify for Boston.  After 18 weeks of hard training, he did just that with a time of 3:29.  Legend status has been achieved.  I actually think the hardest part for him will be thinking of a new blog name.  Maybe we can help out - www.bobsgymhoneys.com is available.  Shall we take up a collection so we can buy the URL for him?

But the coolest part of the story?  It was all the tweets, blog comments, and Facebook wall posts I got after the race.  Many of you where following my progress online.  I didn't expect this.  But picking up my Iphone to see tons of congratulatory messages BEFORE I even posted anything was simply awesome.  Thank you.

As far as my race went, I'm very happy with it.  I play-listed two hours worth of Social Distortion on my Ipod.  My bib number allowed me to line up just behind the elites so I started with the gun.  And then I enjoyed every second of the race.  I'd been publicly saying I wanted to come in under 1:45, but privately I was gunning for a sub 1:40 finish.  So when I saw that the 1:40 pacer was just ahead of me around mile nine, I dug just a little deeper, passed him and maintained the pace to the finish.   Final time - 1:39:14.

What a great weekend.

Surf City Half Marathon

The race is hours away.  I've never "raced" anything more then a 10K.  But I've run high enough miles to know that barring the unexpected, the race should go fine.  Still, this isn't a training run, it's a race.  So there's more pressure.

I finally met Chris K today.  First we met up at the race expo.  Racing Dawn was there too.  We all had a nice visit and then walked the expo a bit.  I was looking for a plain white bandanna or relatively wide head band.  I couldn't find anything close.  I would have thought that a plain white headband would be a fairly easy catch.  Nope.

Chris K bought an EFX bracelet.  I'm dubious about almost everything, but I did the "with" and "without" balance test and I must admit there is a difference.  I'm sure that in a few years we will come to find that the the cosmic energy emitted by the hologram makes you sterile, because it's all just a bit too mystical to me.  That said, I'm still taking the chance - I have a necklace that someone gave me awhile back and I'm going to wear tomorrow.

Me, Racing Dawn & Chris K.  Kovas had to go use the bathroom.

Later on, Chris joined Mary, Ian and I at Sebastiani's, one of our favorite restaurants.  It quickly became clear that I eat way more than Chris does, and I actually felt self conscious about it.  It was like I was completely ignoring one of the basic tenants in the quest for elite athletic prowess by eating (some) calamari, (most) caprese and (all) chicken pasta - a/k/a too much.  But every bite was so damned good, and I'm no elite anyway.

Besides, if I finish the race tomorrow in under 1:45 I reckon I didn't do anything wrong anyway.