Fairfield, CT Half Marathon
By Barefoot Gentile
It’s that time of year again, my favorite race has arrived. Let’s start off with training, there wasn’t any, well a little bit, I had a few 10 milers in there, but nothing like I normally would do to prepare. I had some weeks where I didn’t even run, considering the past events with my wife in the hospital and the birth of our baby girl, there was just no time to run, or just being so tired I didn’t feel like it.
My beautiful little girl Olivia – 2 months old.
Sunday morning of the race was perfect, it was about 62 degrees at 7Am. I said to myself I’m just going out to have fun, which I always do, but of course that inner competitiveness always gets to me. I didn’t have a set time to finish, but who was I kidding. I left the Garmin home for this race, I’m actually trying to get away running with a Garmin, it’s been two months running without it and don’t miss it all. I’m trying to get back to my roots when I never wore a watch running. One thing about getting older, and running is that time and speed start to become secondary to the joy of just running.
The first mile I was at an 8:20, way to fast I wanted to scale back but didn’t, the adrenaline from races and the excitement always tend to get the best of me. Things were going well but was feeling tired throughout the whole race. By mile 10 I was breaking down, and the idea of pushing it more for the last 3 miles wasn’t going to happened. I finished with a time of 1:51 @ an 8:31 pace. I didn’t run at an 8:30 pace for about 3 months, so considering my lack of training, and sleep deprived I was happy with the results. No wonder I was so wiped out. Another great thing was running without my Garmin, it felt really good not looking at my wrist and worrying about pace or time. Garmin-less running is the way to go.