Since the last update

Alright, last Sunday went pretty well, won the UB 530 and got 5th in the Party 530 with a pile of other cashes. I more or less decided not to do too much drinking/general bad decision making until after the 1/2 Marathon which was this Saturday. I got kind of sick around ~Tuesday and was concerned that it would continue until the race. By Thursday night I was trying to fix my sleep schedule to wake up for my 8:40am flight the next day(I only booked a flight this early since the race was at 630am)

A friend of mine asked if I was playing Thursday night and I didn't really have anything to do besides laundry so I said I'd play early tournament and try not to play anything thats either semi-major or will end by like 11. I ended up playing a lot of the random like 30r's and whatnot, and ended up playing the FTP 109r and Stars 109r as my latest
tournaments just since the fields are tiny. I ended up bubbling Stars and got 3rd in FTP so I was up until past 1, so that didn't really go according to plan. I then had to finish laundry and had trouble finding my socks and ended up not sleeping until far too late(think like 3:15).

I woke up at 5:15, finished packing, and went to the airport. I flew Toronto to Minneapolis, then made the 30 minute flight to Duluth. On my flight everyone was either a runner or a volunteer, I met up with MPHL(Michael) at the airport and headed down to our hotel.

It was pretty sweet since he's run a bunch of 1/2's and a couple full marathon's before so he was pretty competent with regard to nutrition, water, sleep, gear etc, and more or less was able to answer any obscure questions I had.

Its pretty impressive how big this race was in a down this small. Theres like under 100,000 people here, over 15,000 runners and over 5,000 volunteers. I have no idea how many people came to cheer the race on, but there were people along the whole 13 mile course and there were about 3-5 miles of it being PACKED, I'd guess probably close to half the town came out to watch.

We went and got our race packages, had a big pasta dinner and went to bed at like 7:30 the night before the race planning to wake up at 4am. I woke up at 3 and couldn't get back to sleep, eventually Michael got up too, we had energy bars, and headed down to wear the shuttles take off(around 4:50).

I was feeling pretty good and the weather was nice and cool, we stopped drinking around an hour before the race to try to make it such that we wouldn't have to piss, but I failed at that. As we were about 15 minutes from the race starting and the starting area was packed I had to go to the washroom. I decided I'd just stay where I am since there was a pretty good chance I couldn't get back to the porti-potty's and back in 15 minutes.

Eventually the gun went off and the race was started. We were planning to run around 9 minute miles, and the first mile we went about that pace but it felt really slow. It was ridiculous how fast the race went by, the second mile took like 8:20 and it felt as if we had only been running a few minutes. I can't stress enough how awesome it is to have people cheering every step of the way.

We kept having miles that were a little quicker than 9 minutes and it wasn't tiring at all. We were slightly ahead of pace and the weather was starting to heat up quite a bit. I was running in a jersey that was made of a different material than I normally run in and started to feel some irritation about half way in. Shortly after this Michael started having knee pain(he had a knee injury last year and hadn't run this far since). He said it was bad enough that he had to go to one of the medical tents but gave me his watch and told me if he gets fixed up he'll try to catch up.

I had no idea how to use his watch(it has a lot of pacing/GPS related functionality but I wasn't sure what the numbers meant, and I wasn't going to slow down to read the tiny print on the screen) so I basically decided to try kicking up the pace a little bit and just see how things go.

6.9 miles in I had taken 1:00:22 which was a pace of 8:45/mile and about what I was hoping to sustain for the race. A combination of my picking up speed, other people slowing down because of poor planning/heat(I have no idea what temperature it was now, but by 9 am it was 88 fahrenheit) I passed a TON of people. Like as soon as I could see someone ahead of me, within a couple minutes I was ahead of them. About 8 miles in I hit the low point of the trip(but it wasn't that bad).

I have porcelain veneers on my top front teeth since I have really bad enamel and they allow me to at least pretend to have nice teeth. At 8 miles I decided to eat the energy gel that I brought and since my hands were sweaty I couldn't rip it open.

As I opened it with my teeth something didn't feel right and I ended up spitting out half of one of the veneers, my tooth looks/feels super weird now. I didn't really let that affect me and continued going faster expecting to get a cramp at some point and have to slown down. Eventually we moved from the pavement roads beside Lake Superior to cobblestone roads through the city center where the sidewalks were packed with supporters. I kept going pretty quick and about 10.5 miles in I got the closest thing to a cramp I had all race. After like a minute it had gone away.

After 11.9 miles I had taken 1:40:06 so my last 5 miles average 7:57/mile, and although the last mile seemed to drag on forever, I ended up finishing with a total time of 1:50:30.

After the race I got a quick massage, drank 4 bottles of water and had the piss I had been holding in for 2 hours. I was super happy with my time, I think I could have probably gone a little faster, but I also could have gone a lot slower, so it was a pretty good result. This whole event was really motivating for running, I'm pretty excited to up my mileage and start running longer and longer distances. I'm probably running a marathon in Waterloo in mid-August and it should be pretty sweet.

After the run I went back towards the finish line for a bit to watch the Kenyans win the marathon. Shockingly a white American won it for the first time in like a large numbers of years and he killed it. Its pretty sick to see people run 26 miles at a pace that is tough to keep up with for 1 mile.

Alright, this report is getting super long, not gonna write everything that happened, will summarize since the race.

-Got back to the hotel, went to the pool/hot tub, it was sweet
-Took a nap for a couple hours, woke up and felt pretty good
-Had maybe the tastiest ribs I've ever had, got hit on by a 40 year old woman on the way there
-Realized that not being able to drink when you're under 21 is ridiculous
-Drank
-Went to visit a friend of Michael's from highschool before going to a house party that some friends of hers were having
-Was disappointed that American house parties(or at least this American house party) aren't like in the movies
-We ran the streets at beer pong
-Almost got in a fight while trying to find beer pong opposition
-Michael pointed out that the guy was serious, not just taking trash-talking really far
-Got out of there and went back and crashed
-Woke up and we drove to St. Cloud
-Had Chipotle... they really need to open a franchise in Waterloo
-Got to Jeff(JSchnett)'s house to grind Sundays before flying home tomorrow night.
-Currently regretting grinding Sundays

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