Three Things Thursday

1. Thank you for the kind words and prayers here and on Facebook. My grandfather is at home now, and starting speech and physical therapy. He's getting a little better everyday, and we're all very relieved.

2. The half over the weekend went pretty well. After some thinking about the training I did or did not do leading up to the race, I decided not to run with a watch. I didn't want to put extra pressure on myself to have certain splits in pursuit of a specific time. If at all possible, I wanted to have fun.

I definitely gave myself a few pep talks along the way, but I really just ran my own race and kept chugging along. I passed people and was passed. I hit up every water station and gelled as needed. At mile 10 my sister and I caught up with each other and trucked it the rest of the way together. I'm really surprised to see how similar our form is, spooky!

We stayed together until the last 800 meters or so and I took off to see what I had left in the tank.  Still no concept of time, as the course had no one calling out time after the first mile. I rounded the corner about 100 meters from the finish and that was the first and only time I saw the clock. 

The gun time was just over 2:11 and the race was small enough that I didn't think there would be a significant difference between that and my chip time. I was happy, I'd run 2:13 the year before at this race and it felt really good to beat that time by just running by feel.  My PR, I thought, was still standing at just over 2:10 and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bummed that I didn't get it. However, once results were posted online it turns out that there was just enough of a difference between gun and net time for me to get an 8 second PR. Huzzah!

3. I'm hoping to ride this little wave of good running into my next half on June 2. I've taken the week off thus far, but I'll be back in the mix by this weekend. I'm participating in the Westminster Women's Classic 10k on Sunday where I hope to PR, and then the MAC 1/2 Marathon Relay in Maryland on Saturday the 19th. I have a few more weeks of track workouts ahead of me that I'd really like to nail. The original goal was to go sub-2 in June but that isn't going to happen so I'll just shoot for another close PR and attack sub-2 in September when I have more miles under my belt. Marathon training officially starts June 9. Where has the time gone???