hey blogosphere! I’ve been a bad blogger, and I won’t insult your intelligence by saying that I’ll change. But here is a small effort.
I went to Austin this weekend to visit my old friend Steve Young, a.k.a. 57-Steve. We worked together at Trilogy right after college. He managed to get a mobile number of (512) 577-8383 or (512) 57-STEVE. Yeah. We’re geeks.
He didn’t run back then, but has picked up the nasty habit in the past two years… so we agreed to meet up here and to run the 3M half marathon. 3M also happens to be the only half marathon I’d ever run outside of a triathlon, back in 2003, when we lived here.
Steve had a goal to break 90 minutes in a half this year, and I had tried to coach him a bit last year, providing workouts from Seattle that he ran in London. But he got hurt. I must be a bad coach. But he’s healthy again now and was on track to break 90 this time. He didn’t believe it himself, but he’d run 92 minutes on a slightly-short but SUPER HILLY course in France a few months ago, so I knew he could do it. And he did. He ran a smart race, staying with the 1:30 pacer the entire way, and ran an official chip time of 1:29:57. Solid.
I was hoping to break 74 at this race, after running 76:04 at the Seattle half in November when Tahoma convinced me to run it as our workout like two days earlier. Seattle is hillier than 3M, and I was actually able to plan this one in advance. But then I got a persistent head cold about a week before the race, and it was a struggle just to be healthy on the starting line. I hoped to run steady 5:40s for the first half of the race and then drop a bit in the second half if I still felt good. I’d run steady 5:42s on the track for 9 miles with Travis Adams two weeks ago, so I knew I had the fitness to do this. But in the fourth mile yesterday I could already feel that I didn’t quite have it. I ate an energy gel and tried to tough it out. I managed to get my splits back down but was clearly a few clicks slower than I would need to be. I did manage a new PR, though, in the upper 1:15s. Maybe 1:15:40ish?
Splits were 5:28 5:44 5:38 5:48 5:46 5:44 5:41 5:47 6:01 5:44 5:55 6:04 5:44. The 6:01 and 6:04 had hills and/or headwind. I swear.
The best part of the day (and the main reason I’m writing this) happened a few hours after the race. I got two texts from Steve:
Hilarious but keep the face that you read this between you and me.
(We’ve since decided that it is OK for me to share these.)
Go read the link if you haven’t done so already. It is really funny.
Did you read it yet? OK. Good. How funny is that?!! Awesome!! I laughed out loud. So did my running buddies in Seattle. So did Steve.
Hopefully that brought a little levity to your day. I know that most of you probably saw the link on my Facebook wall already… but feel free to comment here, too, so that it looks like people still read this blog.
In other Austin news, it was great to see and catch up a bit with Tim Sandfort, Don & Missy Ruthven, Corey May and George Schmitz, and to see Tim Terwey and Josh Lee at the race. Go check out the new Austin Tri-Cyclist store on 360 at Davenport Village, opening Feb 9th!!
oh regarding use of the photo – it is pretty well-established across race photo companies that athletes can use the shots on their personal blogs pro bono. I know the image header says otherwise :/
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