Long Beach was a blast! The Long Beach half marathon course is awesome, most of it runs by the beach so you can smell and see the beach for several miles. Since I hadn’t ran a half in a while I use a little nervous so I just decided to have fun and not try to PR.
At the start of the race I heard Rudy Novotny say “Runners set....... GO!!” I felt pretty good at the start, I was hoping it will stay this way! Boom! The first mile went extremely fast, the course was pretty flat so I decided to make my strides longer. After a while I slowed some so I wouldn’t cramp or have any other problems.
At around mile 5 I passed a 10 year old. He said that this was his first half marathon and that he felt like he was going to throw up. I ran with him for about another half mile then he had to stop and walk so I kept running. At mile 6 we started to run on another beach, and I heard two of my friends coming by Andrea and Chris, they were running the marathon and looked like they were doing great!
I was hurting when I hit mile 8, it felt like I had knots in my stomach but I wanted to keep up the pace so I could get a few of those doughnut holes my Mom said would be at mile 9! I passed Joe Taricani from the marathon show at about mile 8.2 he looked like he was having a blast out there!
When I hit mile 10 I was feeling pretty good so I decided to pick up the pace. Mile 11 and 12 went by super fast but the last mile was slow and painful. My cramps came back and I wasn’t feeling good.
When I was getting closer to the finish line I started hearing Rudy yelling and I decided I was going to go all out once I saw the finish line. When I saw it I sprinted like someone was chasing me, but wow I definitely felt it when I crossed the finish and stopped.
Long beach was amazing! if you didn’t do it this year you should definitely do it next year!
