11 Seconds Faster, New Half-Marathon PR

Yesterday was a beautiful day. The sun was out. The temperate was slightly cool. A nice wind. I knew it was a great day to be outside and run a longer race. I wanted to get some more mileage for my 1,000 mile goal in 2017. So, I decided to run 10 miles. But when I started to run, I felt pretty good overall and thought I should keep running as much as I could. The miles were piling up, and I was starting to think that this pace felt just like my previous half-marathon PR. Now, since I can barely remember anything these days, I couldn't remember what my half-marathon PR time was. I knew it was something around 1 hr and 50 min, but didn't know exactly. However, I could remember my pace. I knew it was 8:27 min/mile. So, I figured if I could keep each mile under that or close to it, I would have a shot at a new half-marathon PR.

This ended up being a hard race. At 6.55 miles (halfway point), I was just under 55 minutes, so I knew I was on pace to get near 1 hr and 50 min. I tried to keep running hard, but I could feel my strength ebbing. It was all I could do to keep my legs moving and try to ignore the pain. My left hip and left groin were on fire the entire last seven or eight miles. The bottom of my right foot was sore and raw. My right ankle was tender. I knew it was going to be close. I just had nothing left to give at the end. I wish I could have finished the race stronger. But, amazingly, I still got my PR. And even more amazingly, in a nearly 2 hour race, I only beat it by 11 seconds. I put the stats in the chart below so you can see how close my two half-marathons were to each other. Almost mirror images. It looks like miles 7, 8, 9, and 10 were what saved me. I was able to build up a time buffer just big enough to survive my body's fade at the end.

	July 31	July 31	Sept 9	Sept 9
Splits	Time	Total	Time	Total	Distance
1	8:08.0	08:08	8:09.2	08:09	1.00
2	7:59.1	16:07	7:58.6	16:08	1.00
3	8:07.0	24:14	8:14.1	24:22	1.00
4	8:14.6	32:29	8:11.6	32:34	1.00
5	8:23.5	40:52	8:21.7	40:55	1.00
6	8:33.6	49:26	8:32.1	49:27	1.00
7	8:41.3	58:07	8:38.0	58:05	1.00
8	8:39.2	1:06:46	8:30.4	1:06:36	1.00
9	8:47.1	1:15:33	8:33.0	1:15:09	1.00
10	8:52.9	1:24:26	8:34.1	1:23:43	1.00
11	8:46.0	1:33:12	8:42.1	1:32:25	1.00
12	8:47.6	1:42:00	8:52.9	1:41:18	1.00
13	8:07.9	1:50:08	8:36.6	1:49:54	1.00
14	0:37.3	1:50:45	0:39.7	1:50:34	0.10
Total	1:50:45	1:50:45	1:50:34	1:50:34	13.10 mi
	Avg. Pace: 8:27/mile		Avg. Pace: 8:26/mile