The thing has been done.
The thing being the Run the Alamo Half Marathon; the done being the running of it. I’ve been training for this race for a few months after knee pain in the late fall set me back of my original goal to run a half in December or January. I had to start my running from scratch in the new year and worked my way up to longer distances.
I knew I could do this run: the past three weekends I’ve completed twelve-mile training runs. But still, nerves. What if the soreness and little pain I’d been feeling this week flared? What if I got sick? What if I just had an off day that no amount of mind over body can fix?
It’s been seven years since I ran a half marathon. I did my first, and only up until today, half my junior year of college: Boston’s Run to Remember, a tribute to fallen police officers and first responders. It was especially meaningful that year because it took place just a month after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013.
Since then I’ve had a complicated relationship with running. Injuring myself for the first time, then having running attached to my attractiveness in a past relationship, it became something that didn’t feel like mine and I shucked it from my identity. I didn’t know if I’d ever run again.
Rediscovering it this past year has been like waking up. It turns out I do love running, as you can well tell by often I pay tribute to it in my writing here. It was special to me to do another half after such a big gap, and so many life changes in the past seven years.
Because it’s been so long I didn’t have a set time goal — let’s just finish, I told myself. But of course, I ended up getting a secret goal in my head. My training runs, mostly done on the trail, were around 10/10:30-minute miles. The 10-mile road run — Austin’s Run for the Water — had me at about a 9:30 mile pace so I knew I could go faster off the greenbelt. I figured for the half, realistically, I’d end up somewhere between the 9:30 – 10 pace. But I had a nagging feeling I could go faster. I’d already knocked a minute off my mile times on most trail runs since November, but I didn’t know how that would translate to a road race.
A friend’s passing comment got into my head: “I bet you’ll break two hours.”
I didn’t see how, but that did sound awfully nice, and it stuck with me. This morning, to the starting mark of a literal cannon blast (of course, Texas), I took off with hundreds of runners before sunrise through the streets of San Antonio. I’d slept poorly in the hotel room the night before, not helped by the loss of an hour due to Daylight Savings, but felt wide awake as we took off.
As I ran, I noticed I couldn’t find the mile markers . . . or a clock with the time . . . and I don’t wear a watch. I was basically running blind, keeping an eye on some pacer runners who held up pacing signs. I tried to sink in a rhythm that felt fast but maintainable and kept at it. Finally, at mile 5, I saw the first marker that only let me know I’d gone 5 miles, but not how fast. It wasn’t until the halfway point in-between miles six and seven that there was a clock and tracker that would catch our split times. It was at just an hour and I knew I’d crossed the start three minutes after the first runners, meaning I was coming in at the split a few minutes below an hour (my actual split I found out later was 57:41, about an 8:50 mile pace).
Seeing that time, I wanted that sub 2. But the second half wasn’t as breezy as the first. The relatively flat course had its first hills and around mile 9 my knee started having shooting pains, the kind that would normally make me stop and reset. Instead, I tried to correct my form on the fly and run through it and thankfully the worst of the pain subsided. Now I was just sore and pushing. Those last 4 miles were a lot more pure willpower, trying to keep my cadence moving at what I hoped was a consistent pace but essentially still running blind since I had no way to know the time. My side had a stitch and those creeping thoughts of “why the fuck do you do this to yourself, again?” got louder. Spectator signs like “all this work for a free banana” and “if it was easy, I’d be doing it” kept me laughing and kept me going.
The end snuck up on me, but when I rounded the corner to see the ticking clock I immediately knew I’d made my goal — the clock was at 2:01 and I knew I had that three-minute buffer from the beginning. I couldn’t help the smile that burst across my face as I sprinted to the end.
Where I promptly tried not to throw up as I was handed a finisher medal and a bottle of water. I had to swallow down a few gags and push myself through throngs of people to sit in the grass and pour half the water over my head before slowly taking sips (I’d skipped the aid stations during the race — I usually don’t drink water on my training runs so didn’t want to mess with what was familiar to my body). Once I gathered myself I went and checked my official time: 1:58:08. About a 9-minute mile pace and 2 minutes under my quiet goal. Fast enough that my mom missed my finish since I’d estimated being 10-15 minutes slower than I was (oops).
I can tell I pushed it a little – no phoning it in here. My body has needed a lot of water, caffeine, and food to recover and I’m still wiped out. But already the traitorous mid-race thoughts are fading to “I want to get better at this so it’s not so painful” and “I wonder if I can hold that pace for a full marathon?”
But as I took today one hour at a time, I’ll take those next steps one day at a time too.
With Love,
Natalie