Platte River Half Marathon

terrysquier · Canon City, CO Joined: 09 Jan 2005 Posts: 44

Well, completed my 5th half marathon this morning, and while I'm no speed demon, I managed to better my Las Vegas half marathon pace by 30 seconds per mile and 10-mile race I did last month by 15 seconds per mile. I'd really worked hard on preparing for this race and was trying to better my times. I guess my training paid off. Some day I may be able to break a 10-minute pace per mile, but I'll probaby have to lose about 20 more pounds to do that.

The weather was great for running: cloudy and about 45-50 degrees. The course was fairly flat and ran along the Platte River north out of Littleton, Colorado, toward Denver. There was a long gradual incline over a bridge during the last two miles that I could have easily done without, but other than that there were very few hills and none of any length at all. They expected to have 500 people enter the race but ended up with over a thousand, with runners from 16 different states.

I felt great during the run, so I was a little encouraged to work toward doing a marathon in the future. Right now I'm happy doing just the 13 milers. I've got one more scheduled and that's coming up in Fort Collins, Colorado, on Mother's Day. I've got two or three others in Colorado that I'm thinking about. I want to keep up the racing because it gives me something to look forward to that's challenging and keeps me in top-notch shape health-wise.

So, to summarize, my total time was 2:24:10. Assuming that the course was exactly 13.1 miles long, that's about a 11 minutes per mile average. My Garmin Forerunner measured 13.6 miles at the finish line, so if that was closer to what I actually ran, my pace, of course, would be even better.

Terry