My City Half Marathon

Two Saturdays ago, my SIL Sarah and I participated in my town's half marathon walk. We are lucky enough to have some extensive trails around town, some of them in picturesque locations. This year was the 3rd annual half marathon walk.

Sarah and I were so proud of ourselves! Sarah is the type of person who, once she commits to something like an athletic event, googles training programs for such a thing. The programs all said that you would be able to complete a half marathon walk without training, but regular walks as exercise would be a smart thing to do.

She and I spent the late summer and early fall walking as often as we could get away together, but couldn't seem to put aside large enough blocks of time for really long walks. Finally, the week before the event, we managed an eight mile walk, which just about killed us.

To say we fretted over the additional 5.1 miles we would be walking the next Saturday was an understatement.



But the Saturday of the walk rolled around and in the cool October morning air we found the distance more manageable. We were proud of our pace and even did the second half a half-hour quicker than the first half. We felt better after ten miles than we had after eight the previous week. In fact, we felt so good around ten miles that we jogged for a little bit. (After three hours of a brisk walk, we were feeling the effects of the repetition in our hips and in the whispers of the start of blisters on our feet. Jogging had us move the strain to other parts for a short amount of time.)

The last two and a half miles or so were tough, though. We finished in 3.5 hours, well under our expected finish time.

Yay, us!

(These photos were taken by the photographer on the staff of the city's downtown organization.)