My first half-marathon took place in October of last year. Needless to say, this post is a little bit dated!
The race occurred on October 24th, 2010 in Flora, Indiana. While the original location was supposed to be in Lafayette and West Lafayette, there was a long drawn-out series of events which prevented that from happening. Needless to say, I won’t be going into that in this post.
After arriving at the town with my family (Justin, Mom, Dad, Corey, Danielle and Zach all came along), we found a parking spot. As this was supposed to be a fairly sized event but was moved to a very small town, parking really wasn’t very good. I immediately got into the potty lines, after which it was pretty much time to start the race. As was expected, it wasn’t really very clear where the line was or if there was going to be sections based on the pace that you expected to keep. A normal race will have pace sections so that the faster-paced people are in the front – to avoid congestion.
All-in-all, the race wasn’t really too bad. As it was just a small town, some of the roads could have been better, but there weren’t really any potholes to trip on. The worst part was at one point when a dog started to chase people and another when we were running past on-coming cars. I was under the impression that it was supposed to be a close-course.
In the end, I finished the race while beating my goal of completion in under two hours with a final time of 1:55:43. I would have done better, but I hadn’t really trained for the event as good as I should have. As such, I actually stopped and had to walk a few times during the last few miles.
Will I run this event again? Probably not. The hassle the runners had to go through along with the general organization of the event was quite disappointing. However, I’m not letting this discourage me from running in other events. I’m currently registered to run in the 2011 Purdue Challenge 5K along with the 2011 Chicago Half Marathon which both will be great events!
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