KahyZen : Central Park Women's Half Marathon 2013

I originally planned to put up this post the Monday after the race, but given the Boston incident, I decided put it off in remembrance of the victims. This post is dedicated to little Martin Richard, Lu Lingzi and Krystle Campbell – May your souls rest in peace…

Let me start by saying, never run any kind of marathon without training, it is the quickest way to sustain injuries. With that said, my goal to run 30 miles the week preceding the Women's Half didn’t quite pan out. With work, chores and blah blah excuses, I just couldn’t get the runs in.

On the race day, it felt like everything that could go wrong went wrong that morning. We had a late start because my darling husband went out the night before and couldn’t get out of bed. Then we had to stop for gas ‘cos we were completely empty, then, there was a construction detour on the GWB which we didn’t catch until it was too late so we ended up in NJ. Long story short, I got to the race at 8:14 and had to run with the 9-10,000 group instead of the 5,000’s.

The race started off great, since I decided not to run for time, my strategy was to keep a steady pace to avoid exhausting myself. This was easy to do 'cos I knew the terrain well, the Hubs and I along with one of our friends had been doing the loop around the park every Saturday, 4 weeks in a row, so I was able to anticipate every hill and slope – nothing was a surprise.

The first 4 miles and change were a breeze, I almost hit Mile 5 before I took a real break. After that point, I started to jog at a slower pace to conserve my energy in prep to go around the park a second time. I was able to keep the jog to a slow and steady pace through to Mile 8 when I started to feel some pain when I coughed - I had a nasty cough the week prior.

I took a quick 1 min break to stretch my muscles and started the Jeff Galloway Method. You run 5 mins and walk 1 minute – the technique helps to ensure that neither your running or walking muscles fatigue easily which means you can run long distances. Jeff Galloway got me to Mile 11 which seemed to take forverrrrrr to get to and Mile12 seemed even longer.

Midway to Mile 13, I thought power walking might be my reprieve, but for some reason, it seemed much harder to walk than it was to run. So, I gave the last .5 mile all the energy I had left and trotted to the finish line - Triumph! 2:50:12

I had never been so happy to see bananas at the finish line; this genius here was too ‘busy” to eat before the race. I pretty much ran on an empty stomach and drank 2 cups of Gatorade at every waterstand. So there you have it!!! That’show I completed 2013 women’s half without training.

Dumb Things I Did Before the Race

- I didn’t train

- I had indian food the afternoon before ( I had a monster heartburn , banana solved that problem)

- I didn’t stretch before the race

- I ran in my beat up old Brooks sneakers and my pinkie toe burst right through the fraying fabric of my right sneakers hahaha