April: 77 miles

I'm glad this month is over. I'm blaming the low miles on my back problems earlier this month. I wasn't able to really run for over a week and even then they weren't good ones. Fortunately the pains have passed. I'm looking forward to a fresh start beginning tomorrow. New month, fresh miles starting again from zero...

Marathon Monday!

Today was the 110th running of the Boston Marathon. For many, this is the pinnacle of years of dedication, sacrifice and countless hours of hard work. It's a goal many aspire to achieve. I love watching the marathon event televised live. The stories of these runners are amazing and truly inspirational. My goal is to run Boston in 2012. I have a lot of work to do in order to realize this goal, but I know with proper training and time I can be there, too. I will be 40 that year and this will be my gift to myself. Look for me in six years!

http://www.bostonmarathon.org/

Race for the Roses Half Marathon

I ran the Race for the Roses Half Marathon this morning. My official time was 1:57:08. This is a PR by about 11 minutes for me so I'm very pleased with the finish. I was worried going into the race because my back has been giving me problems this week (no running this week equals no blog posts this week) but it was fine today. It started to bother me the final two miles so those were tough, but overall it was good and I still feel fine.

The weather for this morning's race was perfect. Temperature was around 45*, cloudy with a little sun and not a drop of rain. You can't ask for too much more here in Oregon.

The route was fairly flat since it was all run downtown (Portland), but it crossed the river at the beginning and again at the end so there was the one bridge to go over. There's also a good hill early on at the south end of downtown, but pretty flat otherwise. I don't care for out-n-back courses, but miles 8 to 11 were an out-n-back and it was actually kind of nice to see and cheer on the front runners.

Chipotle was a sponsor so they had burritos at the finish line. Yum. Nothing quite like running 13.1 miles and topping it off with a chicken burrito at 9am.

I hadn't run this race before and I don't know that I will again. I have my favorites and this one just didn't rank up there due to the course winding all over downtown and the out-n-back. There were about 1400 in the half which made for a nice size field and it was chip-timed so that alleviated some of the bottlenecking early on. Organization was good and overall it was a good experience, just not a terribly exciting one.

At least I got my sub-2 hour half goal. That feels pretty good.