April 30, 2017 OKC Half Marathon

For some odd reason I decided to train for and run a half marathon. If you've read any of my older blog posts, you'll know that I don't like running. In fact, I hate it. No "runners high" is coming my way. 

I normally do about one or two 5K races per month between September and May. Having a goal in mind helps me to get up and run during the week. However, this time I trained for about 10 or 11 weeks then ran this half without any 5K races mixed in. I've run a full marathon before and just could not convince myself that it's worth it to ever do that again. Even though the half is still 13.1 miles, it doesn't feel as bad by comparison.

I wanted to run this thing in under 2 hours. I came in at 2:02. That's really disappointing. I think I would have felt better had I missed my goal by 30 or 40 minutes. To get so close and be so far. :(

In my defense, the temperature was 42 degrees. The wind was blowing really hard at 20 mph. We had a bad storm blow in the night before. So bad that the city had to work through the night to clear downed power lines and several trees that had snapped. I wish I had some pictures of the damage. There was also residual rain showers that morning. Nothing worse than cold rain. It was blowing in from the southwest and only impacted me between miles 8 and 10 but that was enough to kill me. 

There were a few things that struck me about this race. One was the lack of diversity. I bet there weren't 70 black people at this thing and there were over 26,000 people running.  I guess I shouldn't be that surprised. I rarely see people of color at races and Oklahoma isn't known as a racial melting pot. I came across a very interesting article about blacks and running. It's long but really worth the read. Click here to read it. 

I was also struck by how good a woman can look and smell while running a half or full marathon and how utterly disgusting all of us guys are. Of course, we are more prone to just spit at any moment along the course but even still, the guys just dripped with funk. So did I. The women in their running shorts and pants looked hot. I'd run past one shapely woman after another. Most guys (including me) just got up and threw on something and headed out the door. No shave. No shower. No clean clothes. I was inclined to try to flirt with several sexy ladies. After all, I had the perfect intro "so what was your time?" However, my look of near death accompanied by my road-kill smell deterred me. 

I have three pictures from the race. Look here, here and here. 

Finally, my body held up better than I thought it would. During the course of the training I acquired really bad plantar fasciitis on the bottoms of both feet. My heels would be on fire and I could barely walk. Plus, I couldn't curl my toes. About two weeks before the race I had to really scale back on my training. I would soak my feet after every run. I'd also massage my feet and toes. They were on the mend by race day but I was really afraid of a flare up. Some days the flare ups would be so bad that I couldn't walk. Let alone run. Nope. Things did hurt a bit but that's just to be expected when you're out pounding your feet for 2 to 5 hours. I got home and soaked then took a nap. I was a bit stiff but in good shape.

After a week, I was almost back to normal. I was able to run a simple 5K race the next weekend.

Addendum: You'll see from the pictures that I normally run with my MP3 player. I like to change up the music. However, for this race I didn't feel like continually fooling with it. I have several R Kelly albums on the device and for 2 hours I listened to this guy. No wonder I wanted to get freaky and go half on a baby with every woman there. :)