This is the second year that the Navy 5 Miler has fielded a half marathon as well, and my second year doing it as well. The course covered the same ground as last year but in a different order. This year we first went up Rock Creek Parkway and then came back down through Potomac Park, while last year we ran through Potomac Park first and later up Rock Creek Parkway. I like the course itself slightly better in this year's order, but the downside is that this year faster half marathon runners had to share the road with slower 5 Miler runners for the last 4 miles of the race from East Potomac Park to the finish. It wasn't too crowded but did require a little bit of weaving and made it basically impossible for me to get water at the last water stop, which was overwhelmed with 5 Miler runners. No big deal, but I think that running the half marathon course in last year's direction was on the whole preferable, even though it meant running into the almost inevitable headwind from the Northwest off the Potomac river for longer. That said, I enjoyed this year's course and ran a solid race. My main goal was to run strong the whole way, unlike last year, at somewhere around the pace of my tempo runs lately, which have stretched to 7 miles in the high 6:20's. I achieved that goal and felt particularly strong in roughly the second third of the race. I held on to a good pace almost to the end, only slowing down somewhat in the last mile. Here are my paces for each mile, according to Garmin:
mile 1 - 6:27
mile 2 - 6:31
mile 3 - 6:26
mile 4 - 6:33
mile 5 - 6:29
mile 6 - 6:32
mile 7 - 6:24
mile 8 - 6:08 (!)
mile 9 - 6:20
mile 10 - 6:18 (official 10 mile split - 1:04:21)
mile 11 - 6:19
mile 12 - 6:30
mile 13 - 6:43
finish - official time 1:24:39, which is 6:27/mi.
I started out conservatively, in part because after the first mile we were running into a light headwind and the low rolling hills on Rock Creek Parkway involved slightly more uphill than downhill. After 5 miles there was a turn-around and I ate a gel (mainly to practice for the marathon). Once I got the gel down, I started picking up the pace. My eighth mile was not as fast a Garmin says - it included passing under the Kennedy Center overhang, which screws up GPS measurements. But I did run a bit faster there, maybe more like 6:18, in order to get clear of a group of a few runners, including the second place woman, whom I had been running near for most of the race to that point. One of them reappeared at the very end of the race and passed me going up a small hill in the last half mile, but everyone else I passed during the race stayed behind me. I kept up the faster pace until we rounded Haines Point and turned into the light headwind again just as I was beginning to fade anyway. That's when crowds prevented me from getting water and my stomach started feeling sour from a second gel I had eaten at 9 miles (this time solely to practice for marathon fueling) without getting any water afterwards. I felt pretty miserable during the last mile and definitely could not have run any faster than I did. My finishing time was a PR by 2 minutes and roughly what I thought I could run based on how my training has been going. I'm especially happy about how strong I felt during the second third of the race, without totally falling apart afterwards. My 10 mile split is the second fastest 10 mile time I've run, 21 seconds faster than my Cherry Blossom time last year (though I ran 1:03:01 at Cherry Blossom this year). And I also can't but notice that my pace is just a hair slower than 20 minute 5k pace (6:26/mi.). When I first started running seriously in 2009 (not including a little running I did decades earlier as a teenager) my goal for a long time was to run a 5k under 20 minutes, which I finally did for the first time in June 2011. (I also did it once in 1991 as a teenager, which is why that particular goal of beating my then-16-year-old self motivated me.) I made huge strides in 2011 and also broke 19 minutes for the 5k about a month later and ran my first sub-40 minute 10k a few months after that. I haven't been able to keep up quite that rate of progress since then, in part because of injuries in both January 2012 and January 2013 (a pattern that I hope to break this coming January). But it feels good finally to have run this particular pace for a half marathon in my first real Fall race of 2013.
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