The Georgia Peach Jam Half Marathon was yesterday, and the words for the day were wet, muddy and humid. What was supposed to be a perfect weather weekend for running went south very quickly as rain moved in overnight on Friday.
The race was held on the Big Creek Greenway, which is a very nice area to run when it has not rained overnight. There are many spots where it just does not drain well. While the rain stopped right before the race kicked off, there was still standing water all over the course. What this meant was that runners needed to navigate around the water, which meant running onto the grass at many points. This resulted is shoes and legs covered in mud very early on, and wet shoes throughout the race.
I started out the race pretty good. I was under a ten minute mile at the 3 mile mark. This is where I could really tell that the tempo/pace runs I have been doing for the past six weeks had really helped. If I could keep up that pace I was easily on my way to a PR. This was not to be. As I have found out in a couple of previous races, humidity is just not my friend. By about the halfway point of the race, I was starting to feel it. This was also the point where my wife, Karen, blew on by me. I could see her up ahead for a little while, but soon lost sight of her. She was gone.
My wet shoes and I trudged on through the last half of the race, and I finished with a time of 2:17:35. That's about four minutes slower than my PR. I was also thankful that Dirty Spokes might have measured the course slightly short. I have a Garmin and Karen uses the Nike IPhone app. Both showed the distance we ran at 12.9 miles. I have never had that happen in a race before. If anything it is usually a little longer than 13.1 due to having to weave around people.
So it's onto the next challenge now. The local 10K on July 4 followed by the Hotlanta Half in August.
