Last weekend we took a trip to Springfield (IL) for a very Lincoln weekend. We drove down Friday night, and on Saturday went to Lincoln's tomb, his house, the old state capitol and the Lincoln museum. Everything in Springfield seems to be Lincoln themed. And there's no better way to relax at the end of a day of sight seeing than to run a half marathon! So, here's the report, which will be long. I'll throw in a tl;dr at the end.
Background/Prep
For Christmas, I got a race entry from a race to be picked at a later date. I picked the Moonlight Marathon, which offered a 5k, 6.55mi, half marathon, full marathon, relay marathon and ultra-marathon. Because I'm not totally crazy, I signed up for the half - I'd never done one of those before. The fun 'hook' for this race is that it is in the cemetery where Lincoln is buried (Oak Park Cemetery) and takes place at night. The half marathon started at 7pm, so the first lap was still light, but the second lap would be in the dark, and the marathon "winner" is the person who finished closest to midnight.
Training was good until about two months ago when I went for a run and something was not right with my knee. I think it's an IT band issue. After much googling (and no doctors) I decided to just rest it until it felt better, which was several weeks later. This, of course, hurt my general training plan. It's not like I had a rigid plan or anything to begin with, but my loose outline of a plan certainly didn't call for a three week stretch with only 10 total miles of running less than a month before the race. In the last 2 1/2 weeks before the race I got more regular runs in, though the longest was only 7.4 miles. All told this year I had only one run longer than that 7-miler prior to the race. Not ideal.
So, I dialed back my expectations by 5 or 10 minutes for the race, and just hoped I could finish it without my leg falling off.
Then we went to the cemetery the morning of the race. There are hills. Oh, there are hills. It's not that there is a specific big hill, it's that the whole cemetery rolls up and down, and race course is two laps weaving around just about every road in the whole place. When I saw that, I dialed my expectations back another 5 or 10 minutes and prayed that I wouldn't die.
The Race
We didn't have a hotel room or anywhere like that to hang out, so we got to the park where the race started about 90 minutes early, picked up my stuff and spread out a blanket on the grass to lay down for a bit. The girls played on a playground. We watched the 5k and 6.55mi races start. I got changed, put on my glow stick necklace and headlamp and eventually went to the starting line. There were 83 people doing the half marathon, so I just slid into the middle of the pack and we started. The first quarter mile or so was on a sidewalk, which made some early passing difficult, which is what I wanted. As I really wasn't sure how the race would go for me, I wanted to be extra conservative at the start.
Lap 1
It's really hard to not pass people when they're right there in front of you and you know you can pass them. In the first mile or two I made my way past a few dozen people. Because there were so many different races on the same course, and they all started at different times, you couldn't be sure who you were really racing against when you saw someone on the course. Also, the course looped so much you couldn't see anyone who was more than a hundred yards or so in front of you, so it was very difficult to tell where you stood in relation to the other runners.
Somewhere around mile two or so, I also took my first wrong turn of the day. The course was generally well marked but because there were turns and forks in the road constantly, if you stopped paying attention for just a moment, you could make a wrong turn. A runner about 20 yards ahead of me made a wrong turn on lap 1, and I followed her. Luckily we merged back into some runners quickly, and figured out our error and went back. I guessed at where that was on a map and came up with 0.15 miles that we added to the course with that wrong turn. The good news was, it at least didn't involve a hill.
I'll spare you the elevation map I made on the internet,but know that there were hills. The elevation change between the high point and low point on the entire course is probably less than 50 feet, but because the course is so looped in on itself, we kept going up and down the same hills. At times the course would go down a 30 foot hill and then literally make a u-turn and go right back up it.
After getting back on the course, I caught up to 3 guys that I'd passed a little bit earlier and decided to hang with them for a while, so I wouldn't make any more wrong turns. They were friendly (as friendly as people can be while in the middle of an exhausting race) and we hung together for quite a while. For the remainder of the first lap, I was feeling good and felt like I could easily have pulled away from the other guys at any time, and even wondered if I was going too slow. (Spoiler: I wasn't.) We came back to the start/finish line and Shannon, Julia and Ella were there cheering and gave me a high-five. Because the marathon was a prediction race, they didn't have any mile markers on the course, and I didn't even wear my watch, so I really had no idea what my pace was like. I took my first cup of water and kept powering on.
Lap 2
I started planning on when to drop the other three guys. I figured I'd say, "I'm going to push on a little bit, you can come if you want," and then go off on my own, but I felt a little bit bad, so I kept putting it off. Thank goodness for my own fear of sounding like a jerk. Slowly, our group of four was pulling apart, with me and Scott consistently in the front, and Marlon and Gavin(? Kevin? Something like that) sliding back a few yards at a time.
Lap two started getting dark. The cemetery isn't very well lit (not surprising) and eventually we had to put on our head lamps. I don't really love how bulky mine is, or the fact that it's made for someone with an enormous head. I had to safety pin the strap to make it tight enough. (I was smart enough to do some trial runs in the dark the week before the race and figure this all out.)
About two miles in to the second lap, we suddenly found ourselves at Lincoln's tomb, which is supposed to be about 4 miles into the lap. Crap. Another wrong turn, and this time, in the dark. Also, we had just done the steepest climb on the course to get up to the tomb parking lot when we figured out that something was wrong. We stopped, went back to the previous intersection and tried to figure out where we went wrong. Some volunteers tried to tell us we were going the right way, but we knew we weren't supposed to be there, so we just went backwards until we found our error again. I mapped out what I think we did wrong and I think it was about 0.40 miles (round trip) that we added to the race. Apparently we wanted to get our money's worth. Back on the course, and passing people again. There are some people that I passed three times, even though they never passed me. I'm not sure if they noticed or not.
For much of the second lap, I kept going back and forth about how I was doing. One minute I'd feel like I could step it up a bit, the next I was wondering how I would maintain the current pace until the end. By this point it was just me and Scott who was a great impromptu running buddy. I need more running buddies.
Over the last few miles, my legs were done. My breathing was fine, but leg muscles all over were starting to hurt, and I was running out of energy as well. It felt like we were holding the same pace, though I have no way of checking. Scott said he thought we were in the top ten overall, "probably 5th and 6th", though I thought he was crazy for placing us that high. I asked him if he had anything left for a sprint at the end, and he said he would try over the last tenth of a mile or so. With about a third of a mile to go, I told him I wanted to see if my legs had anything left, and I took off. The final quarter mile is along a candle lit path in the cemetery, then across a street, through a slightly muddy field, around a pond and into the finish line. I suppose I was going faster, though at that point I don't even know if I was. Finish time was 1:57:13. (8:57/mi) That was 6/83 overall, 4/26 men. Despite my "kick" Scott was only 10 seconds behind.
Afterward
I found some water, and so much food. Pizza, chocolate milk, water, cookies and grapes. I passed on the oranges, bananas, Pepsi and beer. Shannon and the girls were still there and everyone was in good spirits (though Julia would soon melt down). Even though we had to drive three hours home that night, I really wanted to hang around to see if I might have gotten an award. They were giving out top 3 men overall and then top 3 men under 40 awards, and I figured I had a decent shot at an age group award. I was up the hill getting more food (pretty cruel of them to have the food at the top of another hill) when they announced that I was the 3rd place male finisher! I made my way down the hill as quickly as I could and picked up my award! . . . which I got to keep for about 2 minutes before they called me back up. I guess there had been a clerical error and I was 4th place male, overall. So I waited for a few minutes and then got my 1st place under 40 male award. My first age group victory! Scott got first place in the over 40 age group. And that was despite adding about a half a mile to the race course. I figure I did 13.65 miles, which is an 8:35 pace and would have given a finish time of 1:52:30. The guy in front of me (3rd place overall) finished in 1:55:18, so I totally would have had him. I guess that goes to show that it's better to be smart than fast. (I still would have been 12 more minutes behind 2nd place overall. So there was no catching him.)
TL;DR:
Night time half marathon with lots of short hills, both up and down. (But it felt like mostly up.) I took two wrong turns which probably added about half a mile to the total. Found a running buddy that I did about 10 miles of the race with, and who probably saved me from running too fast and then bonking. (Also saved me from a few (more) wrong turns.) Finished in 1:57:13 and got first place in the under 40 age group!
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