Saturday, January 14, 2012

Pre-Race Thoughts

I'm pretty sure most of you read me in a reader, but in case you're looking at the real blog, what do you think of the new header?

Tomorrow is a half-marathon. I'm nervous. It's going to be ruulll cold.


I'm running the Cascade Half Marathon here in my hometown. It's Oregon's only January half-marathon, which is pretty cool. One of the things I wanted to do in 2012 was run a race in the rain. Looks like I may get my wish.

Check out this weather update from the website:
Weather forecast as of 1/14: Outside - Snow showers. High near 36. South wind between 8 and 15 mph, with gusts as high as 21 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New snow accumulation of less than one inch possible.


We can only hope. 
The major advantage is that it's at a high school, so everything will be set up indoors at the gym and I can just venture out right when it's time to run. 

It's a straight up out and back:

Start on the left, run to the right along the dots, turn around and end at the left again. 
Simple right?

This is my third half-marathon - the last was in April. I wrote about it here. My time was 2:12:21. My PR from my first race Nov 2010 is 2:08:40. 

I'm not really running this for a specific finish time. I'm much less trained than both of the other races. This is more a test of my baseline fitness and a chance to run in the rain (snow?!) here in my favorite corner of the country. 

That said I can't help but want to just improve a little. This course is much flatter than April's,  but considering I'm less trained, it's a tossup how the times will compare. 

As I've been training the past couple weeks I kept accidentally leaving things in Portland when I came home on weekends. First it was my ipod. Then my headphones. Then my Garmin charger. I finally remembered to bring home all my gadgets: Garmin, RoadID, iPod Shuffle, headphones. Everything's charged. New music on the iPod. So I'm all set.

Stay tuned - pre-race fuel post is next!

Advice for running in the rain/snow? I'm Californian now, I don't know anything. 

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