Brooklyn half-marathon

Originally uploaded by RTreadway.

How cool is this? Two people have already uploaded photos of the Brooklyn half-marathon on flickr. I saw these two runners cross the finish line somewhere around the two- hour mark.

I am generally happy with my 1:35:57 (7:19 pace). It is nowhere near my 1:31 PR, but that was set in 2000, when I was logging 70 mile weeks training for Chicago. This is the fastest half-‘thon I’ve run in five years, and it’s great I was able to continue improving over the winter.

I ran the first mile in under 7 minutes, and figured I needed to slow things down. Then in the second mile, first I had to tie my shoe, then I collided with a runner going in the opposite direction. (The first three miles are out-and-back on the Coney Island boardwalk). Technically I was running in the wrong “lane,” and this guy cut right in front of me trying to make his way to one of the garbage cans. There was nothing to do but to put my shoulder down and we collided like football linebackers, then spun away from each other, unhurt.

I did see a runner in a Vassar singlet among in around 10 back from the leader at around a mile and a half. I yelled, “Go Vassar!” and he responded with a thumbs-up sign.

At the three mile mark they gave my pace: 7:30 something. WTF … I hadn’t meant to slow down that much.

But that turned out to be a pretty good gameplan: easy on the boardwalk, hard on Ocean Parkway, and grit it out in Prospect Park. I spent a lot of time catching up to one Flyer on the parkway around mile six …when I finally got him, I figured we’d run together for a bit, but he just let me pass. My pace had dropped to 7:25, volunteers told me.

Originally uploaded by RTreadway.

I felt v. strong entering the park and passed another Flyer, E.S. I wish I had taken my splits, but I do remember hitting the six-mile marker at exactly 45 minutes, 7:30 pace. If that’s true, I did the rest of it at 7:12 pace. Sweet.

I ended up finishing 533rd of 3,999 overall and 462 of 2352 men.

There were some transportation issues that overshadowed the whole race, though. I got to the car at 6:45 in the morning only to find it has a flat tire. It didn’t look comletely flat, so I drove it to the gas station in an attempt to add air. That doesn’t work. So I have to change onto the donut-tire. At 7:20 I hit the road, my original plan of parking at Prospect Park and taking the subway to the start abandoned. I make it there with about five minutes to spare. Then, on the way back, I’m driving through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and realize … I have another flat tire. I thought it was the donut, but it wasn’t, it was the other rear tire. Weird, huh? I ended up driving about two miles on the flat to a tire shop at 10th and 27th, and bought two new tires.