Running another half

Technically, I've now run a full marathon - it just took 2 separate races.

Lisa and I headed to SoCal for the Disneyland half marathon. It was Lisa's first and my second.

We left Friday morning, Mochi was so excited, he wanted to join in the fun. Pretty sure his little legs wouldn't get him through 13.1 miles.

We stayed with some friends at the Grand Californian! This was an awesome place to stay and I highly recommend it to anyone headed to Disneyland.

We checked in for the race, and found a few little glitches.

To start off, I was #13996 out of 14000. Low numbers = fast runners, high numbers = slow runners. I'm not saying I'm a Kenyan, I'm just saying I'm faster than 4 people. I'm sure it was a mistake, and they did move me to the correct corral once I could provide proof of time from a previous race.

Then, we realized they thought I was a male. See the little "M" under my age? See the "F" under Lisa's? Yeah. Oh well. I should really be use to it by now.

We got our stuff ready the night before, because the last thing you want is to be searching for safety pins at 4AM.

Here we are before we left for the start. Me, Julia, Lisa and Cindy.

And after. We all finished!

So here are my thoughts on the race:

the bad

1. 13.1 miles

2. Boring scenery from about miles 4-9, consequently wondering why I was doing this again

3. Getting passed by a speed walker and a grandma

4. No hills (yeah, going up hill sucks, but going downhill makes up for it)

5. Not being as fast as I wanted

the good

1. Finishing

2. Knocking off some time from last year

3. Getting to run through Disneyland before it's open to the public

4. Getting to run through Angel's stadium

5. Not hurting as much as last year

6. Beating out over 50% of my age group - men aged 25-29. Embarrassing! (Women were actually better overall in this age group....but I'll take what I can get).

I want to get faster. I'm really slow. I seem to be a decent sprinter (gauged entirely by my ability to leg out grounders on my way to first). The long distances just do me in. I'm thinking 10k might be an ideal length. Anyhow, if you have a tip on getting better at running long distances, let me know.