A Tale of Two Half's

No, the title does not contain a grammatical error...I meant to say Half's and not Halves.

At the beginning of this year I made a resolution to run two Half Marathons.  I had chosen the Cap City Half Marathon in May and the Columbus Half Marathon in October.  I did complete both of those Half Marathons, as well as two others.

As I was going back and thinking about this past year, and everything that's happened, I realized something.  In the Cap City Half Marathon I recorded my slowest Half Marathon time.  Now, that's not really surprising.  I had not truly run or trained for an event like that in quite some time and I had also put on some weight during my two year hiatus.  But, I completed it, and that was the goal.

I also realized that the Columbus Half Marathon, the 2nd that I had resolved to complete in 2012, was the fastest half marathon time that I have ever recorded.  Again, not completely surprising, as I had been training a lot more to prepare for this run.  However, it was a little more surprising because it beat a time that I had set back in 2009 when I was three years younger, had been running a lot longer, and was in the process of training to run my second full marathon.

In between the first Half Marathon of the year, and what would end up being the third of four Half Marathons for the year, I dropped a good bit of the extra weight I'd gained and trained a lot harder to prepare.

In total I ran four  Half Marathons in 2012.  In 2013 I will run five Half Marathons (Myrtle Beach, Lexington, CapCity, Philadelphia and Columbus).

I've now run races in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Nevada.  In March I will add Kentucky to that list and will be 20% through my goal of running a race in every state.