Cowtown Half Marathon-

23 Feb-

After returning from deployment I was only home for 3 days before departing for Japan to visit my wife.  I hadn’t seen her since Thanksgiving and this was the longest we had gone from being apart.  Once arriving out there we got struck with a 23” snow storm and had travel delays from Tokyo to Misawa, Tokyo actually got hit with 12” which pretty much shut down the city.  Needless to say over the 10 days in Japan I spent very little time running.  I was jet lagged, tired and honestly just wanted to lounge around and spend time with my wife.

Coming back from Japan I wasn’t due to arrive into DFW till Saturday night at 10pm, with a race start of 7am.  When I arrived to the terminal at the airport I was actually able to switch to a direct flight that got me into town 6 hours earlier.  That made it possible for me to attend the Team RWB pre race dinner and get together at RAHR and Sons Brewery.  It was a great time and it was great to be able to hang out with some RWB people who I hadn’t seen in quite some time and meet some new RWB people.

After getting back from the dinner I was able to unpack and get to be around 11pm, unfortunately I got about 4 hours of sleep and was up at 2am.  First time that has happened in a while, so I just stayed up and cleaned up the house and took my time in the morning.

I wasn’t really sure how the race was going to go since I just gotten of a flight less than 16 hours prior to race start and had barely slept, but I had talked to my coach and we setup a solid race plan going into the race.  I had put in some solid efforts while deployed and knew I was in pretty good run shape.  Unfortunately the course was really hilly and I wasn’t sure how bad that was going to affect my time.

Here was the plan that I had setup ahead of time before the race.  I had it programmed in to my Garmin and was going to try and follow it.

Since I was starting out a little slower and slowly increasing my pace throughout the run I was able to run with some of the marathoners for a bit.  Then there were some people just out in front of me that were in the half.  It was actually the first place female and a younger guy.  I caught them around mile 6 and ran with them for a few miles.  Then around mile 10 we hit the “big” hill on the course.  I felt good up the hill and that is where I started to pick up the pace for the final 5K push home.  With a mile to go I caught another guy that was struggling a bit and tried to motivate him to run with me.  He ran with me till about ¼ mile to go then dropped off.

I was really happy to have a PB for the ½ Marathon distance by 2 minutes, even more so considering it was a hilly and not “fast” course.  Huge thanks to my coach, Scott DeFilippis for keeping me focused while deployed and laying out some solid run workouts.

Results:
7th out of 7,057- 1:16:57

1st out of 339 Male 25-29
Strava File (http://www.strava.com/activities/115608063)

The Plan / The Execution (click to enlarge)