Clearwater Halfathon Summary 1-20-2013

Well yesterday I ran in the Clearwater Halfathon.  This race is touted as one of the most difficult half marathons in Florida because there are 4 bridge ascents.

 This was only my second half marathon, but I was excited to run a race close to home.  We picked up our race packet on Saturday afternoon so we only needed to pick up our timing chip on race morning.  When we arrived to the race on Sunday morning we went to the booth where chips were being given out, but there were no signs indicating what line we were supposed to go into.  There were actually 2 chip lines and one of them shared a shirt pickup line.  We finally got our chips and then moved to the porta potty line.  It took us 25 minutes in this line as there weren't enough available for the 1400 runners.  So far 2 strikes against the race.
The start of the race didn't have any specific pace markers so we placed ourselves about in the middle of the pack.  The race started ell and I found a good spot with some other runners at the pace that felt comfortable for me.  We quickly hit the first bridge ascent and after a mile I was running at a 10:30 pace.  I was feeling that that was a good pace for me to be starting at.  I then crested the bridge and came down the other side.  I figured I would let gravity help me and my second mile improved to a 9:50 pace... Uh oh, that's too fast.  I realized I would need to back off a little and I thought I did, but by mile 5 I was running as 9:53 mile again.  I decided at that point to just go with it and see how it goes!
Well, by mile 10 I hit the wall.  I was hoping to beat my previous time, but my last several miles were just painful.  My back was hurting and I had blisters on my foot.  For the last two ascents I had to walk most of the hills unfortunately.  This was frustrating, but my body was just not responding to me.
Thankfully the last 3/4 of a mile were downhill so I just let gravity take over and pushed hard.  My final chip time was 2:22:22, which was about 6 minutes slower than my previous half marathon.  Given the hills in the bridges I can deal with it.  I'll have to do better in two weeks when I run the Best Damn Race!

Overall I liked the race.  The course was nice and quite challenging. The course support was great with seven water stops and Gatorade at each stop and a few stops had fresh orange slices.

There were a few items that I thought could have been better.  The chip distribution could have been easier with a couple of signs.  There could have been more porta potties and I felt like the course from the Sand Key Bridge to the turn around was run in the gutter and didn't have enough level ground to run on.