I signed up for “Run to the Pub” half marathon because I have been in town the last two years and I didn’t want to miss out this time. Getting to run a race that starts and ends 0.5 miles from my front door is both a unique opportunity and a huge advantage. In October I took advantage of the $75 early bird pricing and committed. It wasn’t until about a month before the race that I thought of any specific goals I might have for this race. I decided to try and run it in under 2 hours since I do not consider myself a very fast runner and I thought that might be challenging for me to achieve. Typically, I avoid running on roads like the plague. I find them to be unbearably boring and brutal on the joints and body as a whole. My mom gifted me my first pair of road running shoes ever for my birthday in February and honestly they made an incredible difference for me.
Leading up to the race I focused on running primarily on roads for three weeks. I did several threshold speed workouts and I PRed my road running distance multiple times. One of the training runs I did with my friend Megan was running the course itself. On that day we ran in 2 hours and 4 minutes which gave me a lot of confidence that I could go under 2 hours on race day. Normally a 10 minute mile pace is comfortable for me and a sub 2 hour half marathon requires a 9:07 minute mile pace. During the threshold workouts I would aim for around an 8:45min/mile pace although I often felt like I could run faster than that. For the first time ever I started focusing on my cadence and used the metronome app to try and increase my steps to 180spm (steps per minute). I usually run around 160 spm and I’d like to see this get closer to 170spm for injury risk reasons. The metronome was really helpful and I found out that increasing your cadence is really hard. I only ever got my average up to 167spm but when I did I was extremely happy about it. My longest race specific training run was a 16 mile road run that included an hour of 30 second surges that I would do in 5 minute intervals. That day was really hard but worth it. Megan did several of these runs including the threshold workouts with me. She is the perfect match of a training partner for me!
On race day I did a short warm up walking, jogging, and doing some very short 5-10 second strides around my neighborhood mostly to test out my clothing choice and the weather. It was predicted to be windy and rainy but not very cold. I chose to wear Janji shorts for their convenient pockets and a long sleeve tech shirt that was included in race registration along with my rain coat wrapped around my waist. Megan and her boyfriend Bryce came to my house to meet up before the start and we all jogged to the starting line together. Megan and I had the same goals today. Run the race in under two hours and finish strong. Based on our goals and previous years results we decided to start in the back of the front ⅓ of runners.
The starting gun went off and we sped down main street in a crowd of people. “Plage Isolee” by Polo and Pan blared through the single head phone in my right ear. Megan and I stuck together weaving around all the other runners. I was not mentally prepared for how long the crowd weaving would last (nearly three miles). We headed up the hill near Lindley Park and towards the hospital. The music in my ear was interrupted with my first mile split “Lap one: nine minutes and nine seconds”. Megan and I looked at each other simultaneously as she had her splits coming through her headphones audibly as well. We both knew we were running very fast for us up the hardest part of the course, but hey at least it was right on pace. It felt unbelievably easy but the crowd of people really swept us up in the race energy. The course starts up a hill for about 2-3 miles before a short sharp downhill, some rolling hills, and then finishing the last 7 miles slightly downhill. I was expecting to run closer to 10 minute miles up the first couple of hills and then slowly increase pace until finishing the last few miles around 8:45. The whole race happened just like this although at a much faster pace than I was anticipating being able to run.
Megan and I stuck together for the whole race until the last mile. Our pace just kept getting faster and faster the whole time and we would look at each other every time the split came through our headphones. It started to lightly rain about two miles into the race and then the rain turned into hail that blew into us sideways as we ran miles 4-10 around wide open farmland fields. Luckily we both had our rain jackets with us and we put them on, while still running, around mile five, it helped a lot and I was so glad I had it with me. My hair was soaking wet under my hat that was shielding my eyes from the precipitation and my music kept pausing and then re-starting as the hail bounced off the touch sensitive “button”. I could only laugh at the situation as my music turned to the song “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield. A parody of the chorus “Feel the HAIL on your skin, no one else can feel it for you, only you can let it in” played in my brain for the rest of the race.
By the last three miles of the race I could barely talk. I was running HARD. At Wilson Avenue Megan started her finish line push and I simply could not move my legs any faster to keep up. At that point my only goal was to keep getting my mile splits to be faster than the previous ones. I knew I was going to PR my 5k time during those last few miles. The half marathon runners converged with the back of the pack of 10k runners who were walking the course so once again there was a lot more crowd weaving to finish the race. Megan stayed in sight until the final turn on to Main Street. I finished as strong as I could in 1 hour and 48 minutes. Once across the finish line I scooped up my medal, a can of water, and a can of element, double fisting them as I gave Megan a hug. I am so proud of us! We both told each other that there was no way either of us would have run that fast had we not been running together almost the whole time.
Run to the Pub was a really big PR and confidence booster for me. I still cannot believe I ran that fast and looking at my splits feels wild because the last five miles were all under 8 minutes each. I am looking forward to trying this distance again one day. I think this whole race was a valuable lesson in learning how focusing on road running for a time can help me become a better runner overall. I am considering racing a road marathon in 2027 but we will see how that plays out. I just expect it to be easier to focus on roads while I am in school. I want to train Twig to loose-leash road run with me when she is a bit older and hopefully we can enter the dog division at the Seeley Lake “Snow Joke” Half Marathon someday.
Des Hikes Thru 