Surf City Half Marathon Race Report
What’s up everyone, here is my race report from the Surf City Half Marathon in Huntington Beach, CA that I ran in on Sunday Feb 4th, 2018!
Just the facts:
Time: 1:44:33
Place: 567/9970
I used this race as a measuring stick to see where I am in my training for the upcoming LA Marathon. For those of you not on Instagram, I have run every single day since last Oct 30th so my legs are basically sore all the time and I came into this race on regular training with no cut back. None the less my goal was to beat my personal best of 1:44:31 set way back in 2011 and my super dream goal was to get as close to 1:40 as possible.
This is a very big race with around 10,000 runners so I had to get there early to make sure I got a parking space so I left my house at 5am and arrived at HB City hall around 6am. The race doesn’t start until 7:45 so I had some time to kill so I just chilled out in my car until 7am. City hall is about 1.5 miles from the start line so they had shuttle buses but I had to get a warm up in so I ran down to the start and did another .5 miles to get an even 2 in. My legs felt pretty good and this is a pretty flat course so I was ready to go.
I lined up in the 1:30-1:45 wave and at 7:45am we were off! I started with the usual weaving around folks who don’t know how to line up in their proper spot and the first 2 miles went pretty fast. This race mostly runs up and down Pacific Coast Highway, it was a nice clear day perfect for running. Shortly after starting I decided on a whim to change my strategy from racing to running the pace I felt that I could run a full marathon in that day and also to run by feel so I did not look at my watch the whole race (this would come back to bite me).
Miles 4-6 go from the highway around some neighborhoods and the only hill was here but it’s not bad and you get to go downhill back to the highway. Once back on PCH it is about 3 miles to the turnaround point and I focused on keeping a consistent pace just below going all out. My legs felt really good and my breathing was under control the whole time but at the same time I was putting a hard effort in.
At mile 9 we turned back toward the finish line for the last 4.1 miles. Running in a straight line for that long is both good and bad. It can get mentally draining to see the road go on forever but it is easy to just put your head down and crank out the miles. Before you know it the finish line was here, I kept my same pace for the last mile where usually I would drop a fast one and cruised across the finish line. I finally looked down at my watch and it was ticking 1:44:35,36,37. That was near my record! In my panic I pushed the wrong button to stop so I wasn’t able to stop it until it said 1:44:44. SON OF A BITCH! I immediately got pissed at myself for not checking my watch earlier as I would have easily got my stupid PR and now had to hope I pressed start a couple of seconds late and the chip time would sneak under 1:44:31.
Oh well what’s done was done so I went to the beer garden like a good runner, got my beer and then did a painful 1-mile cool down run back to the car. After I got home I entered my bib number on the race web site so it would text me my finish time and 2 seconds later I got the text………….1:44:33. F#$%#%K!!!
Good thing no one was around as I let out about 100 curse words that I missed my Half PR by 2 seconds. But actually I was not that P.O.ed (maybe a little) as I really felt that I could have run a full marathon at that pace. Pace came out to about 8min a mile and my splits were all about the same which is good. I am hoping to be able to get to about a 7:45min a mile pace by the time the Marathon happens in 6 weeks so I gotta get back on the road. See ya!
Next race = LA Marathon 3/18/2018