Bronx Half Marathon Race Report

It was cold out there today, 19 degrees F at the start of the race. I got picked up at 6:32 a.m. (ouch!) by my teammate Peter and his friends Steve and Allison. My prerace meal was 60% of a bottle of blue Gatorade (sometimes referred to as "Smurf juice") and a carmel flavored Powerade gel. Mmmmmmm.

I adopted a different strategy this time after my bad experience at the Manhattan half 2 weeks ago. In that race I ran a 7:15 pace the first 10 miles, but then crashed and burned the last 5k. I decided to start out slower and try to avoid struggling at the end. Oddly enough the results were nearly the same. My net time in Manhattan was 1:39:19, today I managed a 138:59. So that was a slight 20 second improvement, plus I felt a lot better at the end.

That feeling didn't last long as I had to wait for the others to finish, although not too long, only 9 minutes. I had 2 cups of "hot" chocolate, which was actually piping hot for the first 15 seconds or so, but cooled off quite quickly when subjected to the chilly air. Allison noticed I was shivering as we were standing around drinking the kind of warm cocoa and we all headed back to the car.

I tried to memorize some splits, here they are: one was 52:30, so that must have been 7 miles. So that was 7:30 exactly, which was my plan. Mile 10 was about 1:13, so I ran those 3 miles in 21:30 or a 7:10 pace, mile 11 read 1:21 or so, so I slowed to an 8 minute mile for that one (we were going up the hill that was a downhill for mile 8). And finally 17 minutes for the last 2.1, an 8:05 pace. My overall pace was 7:33.