shivering before the start
Ok, well first of all, the Big Sur half is really in Monterey/Pacific Grove. I’ve run it for the past two years and found it a fun course. This year, I went down there with Anne and Evan, who had not run the race before. It starts early, so we arrived at 0 dark thirty. The three of us have a history of taking unusually unflattering pictures of ourselves, and utilized our questionable talent once again. This is somehow the better of the two we took. It has been subtly retouched to protect our dignity, or what little of it is left.
The start line had moved a few blocks down from last year, but it was pretty easy to follow the flow of spandexed and race numbered people to the start line, and more importantly, the long row of portapotties.
Ok, so after rushing through that line, we attempted to find our starting group, the C corral. The crowd pretty much became immovable right where it began, so we just stopped and waited for the gun. It was at least warmer in the center of that huge crowd! We listened to the muted strains of some band and eventually shuffled forward toward the arches. Even though the crowd was
running into the rainy sunrise
thick we were able to start running immediately (nice wide street) and were pleasantly surprised by some rain. I was also pleasantly surprised by locating my friend Stacey (you may refer to our adventure at the Bizz Johnson Marathon, and read her race report) and ran with her for a couple miles. We were also surprised to see that Winnie the Pooh was running the race too! Imagine 13 miles in a head to toe fur suit, with the ears and everything. Well, Pooh-bear can run pretty fast and though he started behind us, we last saw him heading towrd the finish when we were still approaching the turnaround.
A very cool thing about this race is that you have mile markers at every mile, and volunteers stand there and tell you how long it’s been since the gun went off. Since I had a working stopwatch, and Anne can do math, when we passed the mile marker I’d say what our real time was, and Anne calculated our pace. Here is our big achievement- we hit an 11 minute mile on the nose at every mile! This is a very solid pace for me at this distance so it’s kind of exciting to have been so consistent.
The course continues along the coast to Asilomar, and the waves had bright white foam with a turquoise underbelly. The clouds were very dramatic and stripey. It is a shame I only have this one blurry photo of the start of the race, becuase the view is one of the main reasons why I’ve come back three times. The other reason is that they have nice techno t-shirts, and a fantastic layout of food at the end. You also get to run through the tunnel (normally for cars) and at the end of that there are bagpipes. An enormous roar erupted from the runners as we went through the tunnel opening and past the bagpipers. I thought we should have been carrying spears for dramatic effect.
The midpoint turnaround came up surprisingly quickly, after which we were at mile nine. By mile ten, it had slowly dawned on my body that we were in fact NOT stopping at 6 miles, and that I intended to keep up this pace. It actively attempted to thwart me with an off and on sore ankle and lungs that wanted to stop the madness. Anne was there to keep me on track, and with some focus and less chit chat we both finished with our awesome pace for a 2:24 half marathon! This turns out to be my personal best for the distance, so hooray for me!
the lunch of champions
While collecting our giant medals and space blankets from the nice marines, we wobbled into the food tent as it once again started to rain. Evan, having finished an impressive 1:56, was waiting for us at the other end.
We lurched to the dry warm car to snarf down our lunches. This was the real endurance test, getting to the car before my legs seized up! The rain lightened up enough for us to change into dryer, fuzzier outfits, but as soon as we were in the car the sky opened up and just dumped on us. What awesome timing! What a great race! And we were home by 11 am. Not bad.
Below: The self-portrait style group shot works much better when the tall person holds the camera. Ah, so!
damp but happy after 13.1 miles
