I ran my first half marathon today!

I’m a few weeks ahead of schedule, but I felt great this morning and was able to finish the whole thing instead of the 11 miles that I originally had on the schedule. I was more than glad to have it out of the way since I was getting pretty bored with the training.

I was excited to get moving this morning, and when I woke up before 6am this morning, I didn’t hesitate to get out of bed and get ready to go. I thought I might be able to run 13.1 miles today, but continued to remind myself that it was fine to stick to the original plan and just run 11 miles if I was ready to stop at that point. It rained all day yesterday, and there was more rain in the forecast for this morning. I was prepared to do what I had to do rain or shine, but I was excited that it didn’t seem to be raining. I ate a banana and some cottage cheese, drank a bottle of water, grabbed my stuff, and I was out the door.

When I went outside, it was a perfect 60 degrees. I left a bottle of water on the lamppost outside our building so that I could loop around and grab a drink when necessary. I also packed some dried figs, raw almonds, and a Larabar in a bag in my pocket. I turned on my playlist of NPR podcasts and started running.

For the first few miles, I ran extra slow. I knew that even if I ended up only running 11 miles, it was going to be a long and challenging run. I wanted to keep a slow and steady pace. It was extremely foggy, and around mile 4 it started to rain pretty hard. My shoes were soaked and made a squishing sound with every step, but I focused on other things and remained surprisingly comfortable in spite of my soggy shoes. Around mile 6, I started eating periodically. I wanted to keep my energy up instead of waiting for the onset of fatigue before taking action.

I returned to our building for a drink of water around 7.2 miles. As it happened, Greg was just coming out for his run and ran the next 5 miles with me. At 9.6 miles, we stopped to drink from a water fountain on the UCSD campus (this was the one and only time I stopped running!) and to eat a couple of figs. Then, we started to head home. When I reached about 11.5 miles, I was feeling pretty giddy. I couldn’t believe I was only 1.6 miles away from my goal!

When Greg finished his run, I had just reached 12.2 miles. I was finally starting to feel really tired, but it was so nice to have had Greg’s company for the last 5 miles, and I was thankful to have only just under a mile to finish on my own.

Finishing my first 13.1 mile run was an excellent moment. If you want to know how I felt, try an image search on Google for “Clay Matthews Predator”.

Hope you’re all enjoying your weekend!