Spanish Fork 1-3-1

Yes, I did it! I finished the Spanish Fork Half Marathon this past Saturday. I even achieved my goal, as I finished in 2 hours, 5 minutes and 22 seconds. This placed me 175th out of 311 persons who finished the race. Among men in my age group, I finished 20th out of 31. Full results and some photos can be found at Spanish Fork Half.com. The above photo comes courtesy of the race website.

The weather was perfect, and the race started beautifully. I was just cruising along, and I made sure to take my walking breaks every mile - that paid off big time later on. During the first half of the race I ran with Scott Ashton. We kept up a decent pace of around 10 minutes per mile. Scott then wanted to see how fast he could finish (he was shooting for under 2 hours). He ran on ahead, and I kept moving as best I could.

At about mile 9 I began to feel more sluggish. I pressed on, as now I had a strong urge to use the bathroom and there were no secluded spots for a "pit stop". By mile 12 I was feeling worn out. I wasn't especially winded, but my thighs felt like they had been holding a person twice my weight. The soles of my feet were also in pain. I took a few walking breaks on the last mile, so I was thrilled to see that I was finishing within my goal time.

Scott ended up finishing just a few minutes ahead of me, and got done in under two hours. Wendy and Karen ran together the whole way, and weren't far behind us at about 2.5 hours. Overall, we were very pleased with our results. We even cashed in Karen's raffle prize on the way out of town - an 8-piece chicken meal at KFC.

On another personal note, this race helped me to my other running milestones: I topped 300 miles for the year, and 1000 lifetime miles since I began running in June 2005.