KC 1/2 Marathon

The day came and went, and I must say that the hills of Kansas City were extremely humbling.  Time wasn't exactly what I'd hoped it would be, but I wasn't necessarily mad about my time, a bit disappointed, but not mad.  I ended up finishing the 13.1 in 2:00:45, my goal was 1:45:00 - 1:50:00, and I was on pace for that until about mile 10.  At that point the hills finally caught up with me and things feel apart in a hurry, my legs quadrupled in weight which made the last 3 miles some of the most difficult I've run to date.

You think about a lot of things while you are running for 2 hours.  And honestly, I will say that my mind was buzzing with generating reasons for why I was going to come up long on the clock.  Training, weight gain, cold, course, playlist, you name it.  But at the end of the day, something that one of the expo speakers said rang in my head, essentially he said that a single race or event shouldn't define anything and if you pin too much to time then you are setting yourself up for potential disappointment.  You need to train and go out and run as best you can, you need to have a goal as something you want to achieve, but over the course of a race many things can happen and sometimes, its as simple as it just isn't your day.  I think in part, Saturday was that, just not my day.  Don't mistake, I feel good about the time, but the competitive side of me, just has a tough time stomaching not beating my previous time, I will hand it to the streets of KC, this course was far far far more challenging than Chicago, it's winding hills and generally uphill grade, was a pretty formidable challenge.  So while I knew matching times would be a challenge, I still remained hopeful.  But bottomline, new terrain, new course, new baseline to work from for future races.

Next up is the Ward Parkway 1/2 Marathon, I think in April?  Should be a flatter so a little bit less challenging in that regard, but it's still KC so the hills will be a factor I'm gonna have to get used to.

**Side Bar** So as I said Friday, spent entirely too much time crafting the most glorious running playlist the world has ever known, song 1 played awesome, song 2... wait this is song 2?... yep iPod was stuck on shuffle.  So the playlist was all for not, still got to hear great tunes, but sure wish I'd have heard them in the order I'd intended.