Frost Pamela 43 F F40-44 2:25:47 11:08

Frost Pamela Ann 41 F F40-44 2:25:19  11:06

Those are my stats….  The one at the top is my finishing time for this year’s Cheshire Half Marathon.  I thought I was going to beat my last Cheshire finish time my best half PR; but I missed it by 28 seconds!!!  But I’m not disappointed with that.  Of course anyone wants to do better than their previous year or previous races; but I am happy that I was just about the same last time I ran that course.  So far the 2013 finish time is my best half marathon finish time.

I left my house at 7:30 and was stopped in Wallingford for a train!  I arrived in Cheshire at 8:00 and had to park in a large field.  I walked over to the track and met Diana and Kim D at the porta potties.  I made sure to use with 2 minutes to spare before the race started.  

They did start it a little later because the crowds were still filtering in from the parking lot.  We took off at 8:40.  The weather was perfect.  It was chilly, around 57 and when we were running I had to take off my shrug and wrap it around my waist around mile 2.  The sun was out until around noon; but it wasn’t too hot.  It was the perfect conditions for this race. 

I wanted to do this race again because it is a great course, and also because it was where I ran my first half marathon.  I will most likely do this course again next year too.
I ran with Diana again and we are hauling through the first part of the race which runs along the Farmington Canal.  We run well together.  With each mile we were going faster and faster!  But I told her it’s a good thing we were getting these times in in the first half of the race because it is like putting money in the bank that we may need later on because the last 5 miles of the race have hills and suck the energy out of me.

Around mile 5 I was doing the math in my head and it was reminding me of the first time I ran the Cheshire half.  I remember texting my husband my first year and I was doing between a 9:30 – 10 minute mile if I can recall.  I’ll have to see if I can find my old stats from that race.  But I was doing the math in my head and was thinking that if we maintained that pace I could possible pull of a 2:15 half marathon!  I know that Jeff Galloway said that when you maintain an 11:30/mile pace you can do the half in 2:30.  So I knew we were under the 11:30 and I was guessing that maybe with the hilly ends we could pull off a 2:20.

We had a quiet race.  We were chatty in the beginning and then during the race we were in work mode and pushed on.  As we left the canal after mile 7 and headed to the road I was feeling a little more winded.  We ran  most of the hills, but a few times needed to catch our breath.  There was only 2 hills that we had to walk through one of our running cycles, I imagine that was mile 10.  I was feeling very fatigued at that mile for some reason.  But we only had a 5K left so we kept pushing.  Diana was really pulling me along, despite the fact that she might not have been aware of it.  At the very end of the race when you leave the canal and head back up towards Route 10 there is a small hill so we walked up a little bit of that and then hunkered down to get to mile 12 and then the last part of the race.

Just as I was about to leave, I saw a crowd around a table and realized it was the Achilles International club.  I had commented to Diana during the race that I wanted to be a guide one day.  I talked to someone there and told her I’d like to be a guide and she handed me a form to complete and asked me what shirt size I wanted!  That was all I needed to do to become a member of the team!  I am so excited that I can fulfill something I had been thinking of doing since I read the book The Long Run by Matthew Long.  They were such a nice group of people to work with and I met Tony who was a wheelchair athlete.  I hope to perhaps guide him for a race in the future!  He has done the NYC marathon several times and will be at the Hartford Marathon in October. 

It’s been fun running local races near home and seeing my Disney friends at these races. The next local I am running is the Mystic Half Marathon.  That’s going to be a VERY early wake up and a nice drive to Mystic.  Hope to possible PR at that race!  I am looking forward to running it with Diana. Mandy we miss you!  Wish you were here!!!