National Half Marathon Relay

On Saturday I ran the National Half Marathon Relay, which was part of the National Marathon, as a part of Team Foodtila the Hon. Get it, we’re food lovers from Baltimore (the hons)? The National Marathon/Half advertise themselves as being the fastest looped course in the country, because the course runs through the mostly pancake flat downtown area of Washington, DC. The only significant hill is at mile 7, and then it’s all downtown from there.

The relay was a three person show–with two 5 mile legs and one 5k leg. I had the first 5 mile leg. My other two team mates were Carlos (one of the usuals) and Lee. We left Baltimore really early for the race–5am for the 7am start. Then, like good racers, we followed the instructions and went to our starting areas soon after our arrival, which means the team left me at RFK stadium (for the start) while they went to ride Metro to find the exchange points. I went to my corral thinking that they actually meant be in your corrals at 6.30 like the instructions said. WRONG!! There were no race officials around, so I could have done like everyone else did and wait in the DC Armory building (where it was warm on the 33 degree morning) until the last possible second. Oh well, lesson learned. I did make the best of the cold and did a pretty good warmup trying to stay warm. But my feet were still frozen solid when we started and for about the first mile, which I think may have cost me a bit of time.

Despite the cold feet, I settled into my pace pretty quickly once we thinned out after the start. I really enjoyed running my leg–since it was a road I used to sit in traffic on all the time when I worked downtown, so it was really nice to see from the running perspective. We ran straight down East Capitol street towards the Capitol building, and it really was lovely to see the building glow in the sunrise. After that we swung out past the Supreme Court and Union Station, to turn down Constitution Avenue to run along the mall. Through this stretch my pace just kept picking up, even as the pace of the half marathoners around me started to slow down. I am really proud of myself for continuing to push even as the crowd around me slowed.

Right around mile 4.75 we turned off the mall and headed uptown. The exchange point was supposed to be at mile 5, but my watch beeped well before the zone–just before the water station at mile 5. It’s hard to know exactly where on the course we were since there were no real mile markers or race personnel on the course. Lee, who ran the last leg, said there wasn’t even a marker for mile 12 and towards the end everyone kept asking each other what their watches said to get a sense of how far was left to go. Bad form for a race that’s trying to compete with Marine Corps in the fall….

Anyways, I finally got to the exchange point. There was no one calling out team names or anything (there were no announcers, DJs, bands, anything on the course except at the finish), so I got the zone and yelled out Carlos’ name and then he was off. Then I looked down at my watch. For the 5 miles that my watch tracked, I finished in 47 minutes and 5 seconds! I ran negative splits the whole way, with my last mile being right at my 5k pace from two weeks ago. I was seriously happy!

Noel found me, I had some water and got my space blanket (I wanted a non RunDisney one that I can toss next time it’s cold!) and Noel and I rode metro back to RFK to see Lee finish. I may have stretched on the bench of the metro station (this is NOT as gross as it sounds, since DC Metro is insanely clean). I got back in time to see Lee streak across the finish line (she said her leg was a bit awkward, since she was ready to go at 5k pace, where most of those around her were a lot slower). After I got lost in the madness that was the post race area and then was found by the team (they put out an all points search) we posed for pictures before heading home

All in all, we had a great time yesterday and we were really happy with our time, which we found out later was 1.56.57, putting us as the 75th overall team. I enjoyed the team aspect of the relay and our shirts were a BIG hit–I had so many people call out to me by name to cheer me on! I’m not sure if I would do the race again, since it was pretty expensive and pretty disorganized, but it was a fun adventure for us!

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