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Executive Summary: 1:38:56 (~ 5 min PR), rolling hills throughout, wind heavy at times, well organized.

Official Results

Motionbased

Background

I ended up joining the race with a bunch of people, here is the quick rundown on the cast of characters:

James – friend from work and in base training mode for an IronMan. He wanted to do the race as a training run since his furthest distance so far this year was 10 miles. He invited me to join him.

Lindsay – using this as a race during her IronMan preparation (and is James’ girlfriend). Loves this event and ran a 1:36 PR here last year.

Ryan – friend from work who is relatively new to running and has been training for the Lehigh Valley Half-Marathon for a few months. Did his longest run yet of 9.3 miles with me on Tuesday.

Myself – been easing back into training since some injuries. Had good volume for last two weeks.

The four of us met on at James’ house at 7:30 in the morning and carpooled the 50 miles to Chambersburg.

The race was held at the Chambersburg Middle School, and when we got out of the car, the sun was out and the weather seemed fantastic. We went inside to register and found the registration process fast and efficient. Holding the race at a school is nice since there is tons of space inside if the weather isn’t great and a decent amount of real restrooms. When we went back outside to “gear up” at the car, the sun had gone behind some clouds and the wind had picked up, making it feel not quite so fantastic. We did about a mile of a warm-up jog and then returned to finish our final preparations before the race. A few minutes before the race the wind slowed down and the sun came out again, making it feel close to perfect. It was really nice thinking of this event as a training run and not a full race, I wasn’t nervous at all. It looked like there was about 250-300 people at the starting area.

Everyone wished each other a good race and the four of us split up to get into appropriate places at the starting area. James and I stayed about 1/3 of the way back from the front.

The course is almost entirely on country roads and traffic was minimal. There were probably 5-6 cars that went by us during the race, and thanks to the volunteers managing traffic (and low volume) , traffic wasn’t an issue at all. The course had been described as “rolling hills”, which I think was a pretty apt definition. There weren’t any killer hills on the course, but there were large hills on the 3rd and 10th miles and plenty of smaller ones in between.

James and I settled into a fairly even effort throughout the first part of the race, although the pace varied a bunch on the hillier areas. I don’t think we got passed by anyone after the mass jostling for position that occurs in the first 1/2 mile or so, and we reeled in a bunch of people. We spotted Lindsay coming by us when we were about 200 yards before the turnaround and she looked really strong. As she passed us, she said she was on pace for her  goal  of a 1:35 finish. Ryan was also doing well when we saw him heading towards the turnaround.

I was very happy with our mid-race pacing. James and I ended up running miles 5-9 at a 7:32/mile pace +/- 4 seconds, despite wind that was pretty gusty at times. Miles 10 and 11 had a bunch of climb and my legs were definitely putting in some effort to keep the pace from falling off too much (splits for 10 and 11 were 7:47, 7:40). I felt like I had a bit of reserve, but really didn’t want to push it to the limit since I knew that would prolong my recovery period. Mile 12 had about 50 feet of descent and was a nice break from the hill climbing, we went through that at a 7:13 clip. Mile 13 was mostly flat ( with a tiny bit of downhill), and seeing the finishing area ahead, we picked it up to a 7:06 pace. Final time: 1:38:56.

This was a new half-marathon PR for me by 4:59 over my Lehigh Valley Half-Marathon last year, so I was pretty happy with the result. On Friday I expected we were going to run this at about an 80% effort, but I think it turned out to be (for me) about a 90-95% effort. I’m hoping to PR again at Lehigh Valley again in 6 weeks, hopefully I can get some solid workouts in and let the taper do its magic.

After finishing, we found Lindsay and she had gotten a new PR of 1:35:23, so she was pretty psyched. Ryan finished in 2:02:00 and was happy to have his first half-marathon behind him. I was really impressed with his time given the very limited training (and the fact that he put in some solid volume the week of the race). I’m sure he will go faster at Lehigh Valley.

We went to the awards ceremony where a decent spread of pizza, chips, pretzels, bagels, and cookies were served. Lindsay received a trophy for getting 3rd in her age group.  After the ceremony was over, we headed back towards Harrisburg. Everyone had a good time and I think we will all be back next year.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 10:31 pm and is filed under running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.