Spring Oregon Half Marathon 2016
Over Memorial Day weekend Chrissy, Josh, Dennis and I went
down to Oregon to run the Oregon Spring Half Marathon.
Well, Chrissy, Dennis and I did. Josh hates running and
Michaela has to figure out how to walk firstJ
I think she might skip that and go straight to running
though…the kid has places to go!
This year’s race started at Heirloom Roses in St. Paul, OR
It’s a really pretty area with lots of roses (obviously) and
farm land. Our finish line was running through an arch of roses!
Uberthon does this thing where they start all the different
distances at the same time, which I don’t know if I like or not…On the one hand
it makes no difference in my life because I’m up at the front anyway, so I
don’t have to dart through the crowd but I find it confusing. My brain wants
them all to start at separate times like all the other races.
In addition they do a weird wave start because everything is
all jumbled together. They send off about 30/50 people at a time. It just seems
like a lot of work.
BUT the biggest thing is that the 5k, and 10K runners are
mixed into the half marathon runners which makes it impossible to know if the
person you’re trying to pass is running your race or a completely different
race.
I was kind of excited to see that I was running as the 3rd
overall woman and trying to count how many men were ahead of me as
well…unfortunately I had no idea who was running which race until we passed the
10K turn around. I had gone into the race not really knowing how hard I was
going to run, due to the fact that my “A” race was two weeks away and I was
running on a team in Rainier to Ruston next week.
I was feeling pretty good and at mile 3 I ate my first Gu.
During the 20 miler I ran the weekend before I had decided
that I needed to figure something else out for fuel during my long runs because
even the few flavors of Gu I use, like Salted Carmel and Root Beer have started
upsetting my stomach.
And yet…I used them again…and they upset my stomach again.
Bad.
Nothing like having Gu hit your lower stomach like a ton of
bricks…and have another 10 miles ahead of you. Luckily I was kind of near the
only bathroom on the course, other than the ones at the starting line. Well, I
was like a mile away, so I kept running because that’s a lot faster than
walking.
The course was just as they described it. “Flat, except for
the hill.”J
There was one hill that wasn’t even as long as Court House
Hill so…easy peasy!
I managed to pick off some more runners after my “Gu Fiasco”
but not as many as I wanted. It would seem that we were all running the same
speed, so when I fell behind, recovered and started running again I wasn’t
gaining much ground because of math.
Math sucks sometimes.
I switched to Honey Stingers after the mess with the Gu and
that seemed to help, but I’ll be honest, I was gun shy on the food front so I
pretty much stopped eating for the rest of the race.
It was on the warm side, but still such a nice day for running!
I kept my pace steady in the hopes of picking off some more
runners, which worked…but there was a group of 2 women about 400 meters ahead
of me that I just couldn’t seem to catch. AND they turned out to be in my age
groupL
turning 1st into 3rd.
Lesson learned…Don’t eat things that you KNOW don’t agree
with your stomach. It will come back to bite you.
I had been struggling with phlem in the back of my throat
the entire race, but hadn’t been able to clear the goober no matter how hard I
coughed or cleared my throat.
No worries!
10 feet from the finish line a giant glob of sticky goober
phlem flew out of my throat and directly into my face!
What makes this even funnier is, every Tuesday before the
start of the work out I warn everyone to spit DOWN, and then I go and spit on
myself.
I was really hoping that the finish line photo would catch
the Kodak moment but it doesn’t look like they took photos…which is another
weird part of the race. I don’t normally buy race photos…I would have bought
this one thoughJ
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