This was the first of two half marathons that I will run.  I had looked at trying to do a race for one of them and actually almost signed up for the Bluff Tuff race or the Mendota Bottoms 10 miler.  I probably should have but it was also nice to save the money and get to sleep in a little bit!

I’m actually writing this a week later so I won’t remember the details…  I started out with the event trails at Wirth.  I ran North first to get some distance in and then ran down to the starting point of Karate Monkey trails. And then did them, skipping the spaghetti loop. After exiting the Karate Monkey trails I ran along the cart path up the sledding hill and turned and kept going up to the upper stadium and jumped onto the trails there.  From there I finished out the Area 36 loop with the shortcut through the Quarry and then ran the entire Area 36 loop with The Tube.  This actually earned me the 8th overall time for the loop!  The 2.5 mile loop has 80ft of elevation gain and took me 28:38 to complete.

After completing the loop I grabbed some water at the Trailhead fountains and then did my normal Wirth loop backwards through the Bog.  I had to get a little creative on the Butler side of the park to get more miles in.  I knew that when I left the park by Xerxes I’d have a mile to go straight home.  I ended up hitting that point with about a mile and a half left.  So I added on some extra sections and kept heading towards home.  I passed all my normal cut thru’s and hit 13 miles just north of the main parking lot and finished out the run completing 13.28 miles in 2:23:07.  I got about 1,000 feet of elevation gain for the entire run.

There were only a few flat sections so my pace never really got close to where my “goal” pace should have been.  My mile splits were really all over the place with mile 10 being the slowest.  I did walk some of the hills after the halfway point and I didn’t really take on much nutrition throughout.