Half Marathon PR and Blogger Meetup!

The last time I blogged about trying to PR at the half marathon distance and come in under 2 hours,  I puked, got a personal worst (2:18), cried and then hid with a bag of jelly beans for 48 hours. So you can understand why this time around I was a little more shy about the whole ordeal. Thankfully, things went much, much better.

I ran the Women's Half Marathon in Nashville, TN this weekend with three wonderful bloggers: Suz, Beth and Jenny. I also got to meet up briefly with Kelsey at the expo. The only downside was that I kind of didn't take many pictures. No, let me rephrase. I took one picture of someone's headband as an inside joke. In poor lighting. Without proper focus. It's a real winner, but I'll spare you all from it. Thankfully, at least one person in our group was thinking ahead and took a photo. I've completely stolen it from Beth, but here's one pre-race shot. By the way, head over to her blog for a much better recap with TWO (count 'em) photos. Rock star.

Suz, me, Beth and Jenny!

So...I drove up to Nashville on Friday, checked into the swanky hotel downtown (four people in a room  = actually affordable) and got chatting with these ladies. I had met Suz before, but Beth and Jenny were new friends and it was great to get to know them OUTSIDE of their blogs. We ate dinner at the completely reasonable hour of 5pm and then spent all evening talking.

Saturday morning was race day, so I did what all smart people do and tried a completely new breakfast. Genius, right? Two slices of toast (gluten-free) with peanut butter and honey and some black coffee worked though, so I'm sticking with it from now on. We got in the corrals with roughly 90 seconds to spare and I ran right behind Jenny for as long as I could....which was about one minute.

I never know if people like to hear the details of the race itself, but here are my thoughts: it was hilly. Really hilly. Luckily, trail running lately has made that less of a problem for me than it normally is, but I still routinely get passed on uphills. The same group of women were all running with me and I would fall behind on every hill and catch up on every downhill. Clearly, I have some more work to do in that area. The temps were pretty great (about 60 at the start and 70 at the finish) and everything was just....great. Really. I enjoyed myself, I got in a groove after about three miles and I felt strong until about mile 11.5. The last 14 minutes or so was tough, but isn't that how a race is supposed to be?

Final numbers: (Hey all you guys who scrolled down to read this first!) 1:55:39 is my chip time. That's a PR by about 6 minutes and admission to the ever-elusive sub-2 half marathon club, and I will take it gladly.  I didn't run the tangents for a perfect 13.1 miles, but I know that I do better having more space anyway, so that's fine. Jenny had a specific target leading up to her next big race, and she killed it! Suz came close to her PR time on this hilly course, and Beth ran side by side with Suz the whole time. I don't mean to brag, but we were kind of all awesome. I couldn't have asked for a better group of women to experience the race with.

The rest of the day was spent doing what all good bloggers do. We showered, ate lunch, went shopping at Trader Joe's for more food to blog about (holy cow dark chocolate covered ginger was incredible), ate frozen yogurt, went to R.E.I. for future race nutrition needs (AKA yet more to blog about) and then had a great dinner in Nashville. All in all? Successful weekend all around.

To those of you who have met bloggers in real life: was it what you expected?
Yes and no. In some ways, I feel like I know certain bloggers so well without ever meeting them! But heading their voices and/or mannerisms that I don't expect can catch me off guard, too.

I've been out of the blogging world for a little bit (nothing exciting, I promise) so fill me in: anything exciting happen in the past 2 weeks?