2010 Pasadena Half Marathon

More details later but ran this on Sunday with a head cold still nagging me, and managed to do a 1:59:01 (9:05 pace), and placed 640/2978. I set out to try for a 9:00 pace and hit 8:59 min/miles for the first 10k and then faded a teeny bit to the 9:05 average (all the hills are in the 2nd half of the race too, btw.).

I'm not very well trained (20-24 miles a week) so no PRs but was doing it as a training run toward some as-yet-undetermined marathon (Eugene is out due to other constraints).

The 9:05 min/mile pace is intentional: a sub 4 hour marathon takes a 9:09 pace. Someday I'd like to do sub 4. My average HR for this race was 139, which shows me I'm a bit detrained from previous peaks (should be more like 132).

I had a good time in this race. The course is not flat, but the uphill sections (2) are not that steep. (I really hate steep uphills where you run on tip-toe.) The bigger hill is from mile 7.5 to about mil 10 and gains 200', but the good news is that after mile 10 or so it's all downhill to the finish. During the last few miles I made up for the slower hill pace by cranking out some 2:06 quarter miles.

This final pic is the sprint to the finish...I had a lot left at the end since I was taking it relatively "easy".

Update: It's now 4 days later and my cold is almost gone...i.e. didn't get worse after the race. Always hard to know when a minor cold should be ignored or respected.

Runner Details	Race Results
Bib: 3988 Name: Paul Gender: M Age: 54 Hometown: Palo Alto, CA	Overall: 646 out of 2988 Men: 469 out of 1344 M 50-54: 37 out of 109 Age/Grade: 58.25% Place: 471 Finish: 1:59:01 Pace: 9:05 Tag Time: 1:59:01 Gun Time: 2:00:03