Running the 2007 Las Vegas half-Marathon

Back at the end of April, I wrote about being Blissfully Ignorant about the run I was supposed to do the following morning. It was to be my wife’s and my first training run with the Las Vegas RoadRunners. As I remember it, that first run was a whopping 20 minute run. It wouldn’t be very long before we were routinely running 6, 7 or 8 miles on a given Sunday.

Fast forward 6 months.

Bright and early yesterday morning, we left the house and drove over to Mandalay Bay. Thanks to me not listening to my wife, we ended up parking way too far away and ended up walking 15 minutes to the convention center. After a brief stay inside the nice and warm conference room provided to the members of the RoadRunners, we headed outside to take our place behind the elite runners and the running Elvi (of which there were more than 150) on the start line for the Las Vegas Marathon. The sun wasn’t up yet, it was quite cold and there were some 15,000 runners behind us waiting to start running.

On our way out to the starting line I was contemplating the nerves I had about running in my first half-marathon. I then thought about the small group of elite runners who probably had a hard time sleeping last night with anticipation for today’s race. While my race was against myself and nobody else, these elite runners are trying to finish first out of 15,000. That has to be a bit nerve-wracking.

Unfortunately, I injured myself about 6 weeks ago. My training was basically put on hold and in the weeks leading up to Marathon day, I had run remarkably little. I knew this was going to be problematic, but I was determined to go out and finish this race. Even if that meant walking the entire course. As it turns out, that’s pretty much exactly what it meant. My average pace time and my overall finish were nothing to brag about. Though, I’m still quite proud to have completed my first half-marathon.

A guy from my office recently completed a triathlon and went on to run the full marathon today. When I was talking to him about the injury he told me to remember that, even though this is the race that I have been training for, that doesn’t mean it’s the only race available. Compounding the injury by over-exerting myself for this ONE race makes no sense. There will be plenty of other races to be run. I took that to heart and really tried to maintain a comfortable pace that would allow me to finish without causing too much pain. The thing is, 13.1 miles, no matter how quickly or slowly you walk it, it’s going to cause some pain.

After the race we ate a bunch of the goodies that they were handing out at the finish line. We then went home and ate some more. Took a nice warm bath, took a short nap, iced my leg, napped some more and then got up and ate again. And, as if that wasn’t enough activity for 1 day, we headed back to Mandalay Bay last night for the Social Distortion concert at the House of Blues. General Admission tickets means you stand up the entire show. After the beating we put our legs through earlier in the day, this made for a very uncomfortable time. We stuck it out as long as we could, but eventually had to head home early.

I had an amazing time yesterday. I know for sure I’ll be back again next year. Hopefully by then I will have run a few more half-marathons. Next year I would like to finish in less than 2 hours and 30 minutes. We’ll see how that goes.