On October 28, 2012, we ran the Houston Half Marathon. We only registered for this race a week or two beforehand. We realized we had a 14 mile training run planned for this weekend, so why not run the half marathon to make the training run much more fun? We could have done our own run, but there would have been no cheering crowds, no water stations and definitely no medal. The half marathon sounded like the perfect way to get this run in.
It was supposed to be a training run along one of our common running routes. We were going to take this run easy and stick to our 6/4 intervals. We stuck to the intervals, but I was feeling so good in this race. We really pushed our pace during the 6 minute runs.
We seemed to speed up through our first five miles:
- Mile 1: 11:15
- Mile 2: 10:45
- Mile 3: 10:30
- Mile 4: 10:35
- Mile 5: 10:26
I knew we were pushing our pace, but it felt okay at the time. We slowed back down a bit miles 6 through 9:
- Mile 6: 10:29
- Mile 7: 10:33
- Mile 8: 10:48
- Mile 9: 11:09
The last few miles got a little tougher. We stopped for a bathroom during Mile 11, but kept running strong. I really didn’t start to feel tired until the very last mile. But we kept pushing with our intervals and finished in a better time than we had anticipated, or planned for:
- Mile 10: 10:19
- Mile 11: 12:37
- Mile 12: 10:16
- Mile 13: 11:17
- Mile 13.0 – 13.31: 8:24 pace
- Total: 2:23:39 (10:47 pace)
We were tired after this one! There were some good options for food and beer, but lines were very long and it was cold. We picked up a few goodies and headed directly to the parking garage. Of course, we couldn’t leave until we creepily hunted down someone in their car who could take our race picture 🙂
Racing to Thirty 
You actually expressed it effectively!