Last Weekend: The Double

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a double race weekend coming up. Well, it has now been and gone (a week ago) and I realized that I didn't write anything about it yet.

ENDURrace 8K
The first of the two races was on Saturday at 6pm. It was a chilly and windy evening, but at least it wasn't raining (or snowing). I made sure I didn't go out as ridiculously as I had done for the 5K and the race felt way better as a whole. Conditions were quite good for this race, except for the headwind for maybe a 1/4 of the course total. My goal for this race was sub-36 and I did just that. I finished in 35:53, which was a PB by 16 seconds (previous best was the Re-Fridgee-Eighter in February of this year).

H+P Team post-race - Photo by Julie Schmidt

H+P's ENDURrace Results

Waterloo Half Marathon
After being home for maybe 10 hours, I was out of the house again, on my way to my next race. I wanted to work the half into a big mileage day, and that I did.

I left my house at 6:30am to run to Bechtel Park. I wanted to arrive by 7am so that I'd have plenty of time to get my number, etc. When I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find absolutely no line. I walked straight up to the registration table and was done. I hung out with some other runners, watched the start of the marathon, chatted with my Health and Performance teammates for a bit, and then headed back out to line up for the half.

I had hoped to run 7:40 pace (4:46/km) for this race which would result in a finish time of 1:40:30. I wanted to give myself some more confidence for the upcoming marathon, but I didn't really know what to expect having run the 8K race the night before. I feel like at spots in the race, I used the previous night's race as a built in excuse to not achieve the goal. I actually remember at one point thinking that I was fine with anything under 1:45. I did get back into race head space near the end of the race, but not quite early enough. I finished in 1:41:56.

After the race, I ran a short cool down around the park, then hung out to eat some food and watch others finish. When there was a lull in finishers, I decided to head back out onto the course and find some friends who were running the full. I had fun running back to the park with the group and enjoyed being able to witness Sandra's new PB!

To wrap up my running for the day, I ran home from the park.
Total mileage for the day was 22.2 miles (35.7 km).

H+P's Waterloo Marathon and Half Results

All in all, it was a good weekend of racing, with a Personal Best time in both races. I couldn't ask for a much better double race weekend than that!