Myrtle Beach Half Marathon

Last Saturday we went to South Carolina where I ran the Myrtle Beach Half Marathon. It was only my third race ever and second half marathon. Follow these links to read about my experience doing the Ottawa Half Marathon last May and the Red Cross 10K in Fayetteville, NC last August. For the record, I ran Myrtle Beach in 2:09:33, coming in 1320th place out of 2800. I finished in 55th place in my age group (men 25-29) out of about 80. Finishing in the top half is a nice improvement from Ottawa. For perspective, my Ottawa time would have made me 1587th place in this race.

When I prepare for a race like this I have 3 tiers of goals. In this case, the primary goal was to beat my Ottawa time of 2:22. I thought this was going to be easy by how well I was running distances of 3-7 miles, but the first two times I tried running the full 13.1 miles in training I was just as slow or even slower than 2:22! My second goal would then be to finish under 2:15. There is no particular significance to this number other than it being a round number and a decent drop from my Ottawa time. By race day, I had actually run the 13.1 miles in 2:05, so my top goal then became beating that.

I had a tough start to the race, there were almost 5,000 people (3,000 doing the half and 2,000 doing the full) on a relatively narrow road that it was hard to get in a good rythm at my usual pace. Even still, I was feeling pretty comfortable as I passed the 3 mile mark and waved to my dad and Sarah who were yelling my name as I ran past. I felt good all along Ocean Blvd (mile 4-8) though was consistently frustrated that the mile markers seemed further apart from each other than the map I had drawn of the race the night before. By the time I got to mile 9 on the King's highway I knew that I would comfortably accomplish my most important goal of beating the Ottawa time of 2:22, felt pretty sure I would beat 2:15, but that 2:05 was going to be tight. As we turned left on Mister Joe White Blvd around mile 12 and had 1 mile to go I knew 2:15 was in the bag, but 2:05 wasn't likely. I then set 2:10 as my goal which is significant because it's how long it would take if you ran an average of 10 minutes/mile the whole race. As we turned into the parking lot of the minor league baseball stadium for the last quarter mile, with the energy of the crowd pushing me and the finish line in sight, I sprinted to the end and finished 27 seconds ahead of my ad hoc goal. While I didn't accomplish the third goal of beating my personal record, I met the other two goals and that feels pretty darn good.

I'm registered to run the Raleigh Rocks half marathon on April 5th and am really looking forward to getting to know Raleigh better by running its streets. If you're interested my three goals are (in order of importance to me) 1) beating my MB time of 2:09:33, 2) beating my personal record of 2:05:30 and 3) finishing under 2 hours. I'm getting good advice from lots of people, including my economics professor, as well as tremendous support from my wife, and look forward to a great day. After that I'm planning on running a 5k on April 26th here in Chapel Hill, and then gearing up to do the full 26.2 miles of the Richmond Marathon on November 15th. I have 9 months to reach that goal!