My first half marathon is in the bag!

It was beautiful day. Perfect for a race.  It was around 40F at the start and warmed to around 55F.  Perfect.  Low winds.  Clear sky.  Wow.

When I got to Des Moines, I realized quickly that the parking garage I was aiming for was full and I would have to park a lot farther away than I had anticipated.  I still had plently of time, so no worries.  I couldn't dilly dally, though.

I made my way to the starting area, found a porta potty, got my stuff ready and dropped off a bag with my warm gear in it.  It was pretty chilly once I took off the pants and jacket.  I had tube socks with me for my hands, but I got rid of them pretty quickly.  I was wearing mid-thigh shorts and a singlet.  Luckily, in the starting crowd, it was warm!

I didn't have a lot of time to spare, so I made my way to the crowd.  Wow.  It was packed FULL.  I managed to find an opening right at about my pace area.  I had checked out the pace groups ahead of time.  There was one at 2:20 and one at 2:30.  I thought 2:25 would be about right, so I figured I'd try to keep around the 2:20 group and see if I could keep the 2:30 group from passing me.  Surprisingly, I didn't have much problem keeping up with the 2:20 group.  It was tough, but doable.  They were ahead of me at the start (no way to squeeze through the group to get to them) and toward the end, they also got ahead of me.  That turned out to be fine.  Most of the race, I was right with them.

The last two miles were hard.  There was a decent but not very long hill at that point that was not easy.  I had to start an inner dialog to keep myself going.  The last stretch with the finish line in sight was wonderful.

I had several Gu gels.  One 15 minutes prior, then at 45 minutes in, 90 minutes in, and 2 hours in.  Seemed to work great!  I didn't take the free gel because I hadn't tried the flavor before.

In the end, my chip time was 1:19:14!  So, the pace group thing worked wonderfully!

My Garmin says I ran 13.3 miles, which sounds about right.  It's always a little more than actual, thanks to turns and weaving.  According to the splits in SportTracks, my first two 10ks were 1:05:00 and 1:05:07. That's pretty consistent!

All around a great race.  Great organization, besides that my printed singlet had a different color than the number tags.  I think the numbers were the wrong color, because the medal matched my singlet.  Or both the medals and the singlet were wrong.  Otherwise, a very well run race for something approaching 8,000 runners!