›Avenue of the Giants Half Marathon
Race date: Sunday, May 1, 2006
By: Justin and Tanya Wray - their first half marathon!
The weather couldn't have been better...we even got a bit of a tan! The prediction was for intermittent rain, which was true up until about 2 am Sunday morning. The day of, the sun decided to emerge; temp was 60-degrees, and everyone shed some layers. Course scenery was beautiful, if you bothered to look up. The road was less than desireable with lots of "crowning", "sloping", and pothole/pothole patches. Lots of people were having lots of fun.
The HR Zone training that I did this winter was invaluable. On the out-portion, I kept to the top of Zone 1 (153 avg.), with occasional spikes up to about 159/160. The first 6.6 I averaged a comfy 9:00 mile pace, and was feeling great when we made the 180-degree turn. On the way back, I was feeling frisky so I let myself go. I watched my HR pretty closely and seemed to hover at the top of Z3/ bottom of Z4 with a 175-180. The great news, however, is I finished the second half averaging a 7:00 pace, and total elapsed time was 1:45.59
The rest of us all finished in good spirits, without cramps or injury, and even Tanya wore her monitor and tried to keep from going out too fast. All of us had much faster second halves than on the way out.
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