Hot Mama Half Marathon and Relay 2012

Kaite, me and Jen after our run last Saturday - with our medals! (I love my Bondi band!) Thanks for the pics Katie!

This past Saturday, me and a few other of my fellow running momma buddies ran our Hot Mama Half Marathon and Relay - a virtual race put on by momsrunthistown.com. We ran it out at the Rails to Trails trail and Fort Pulaski with the Savannah CREW training group. My group's distance for Saturday was only supposed to be 5.75 miles, but in order to do my leg, I had to complete 6.55 miles (half of a half). It was pretty dark and humid by the time we got there around 5:30, but it seemed a lot less humid than my normal weekday morning runs due to the breeze from the river and ocean nearby. The Savannah CREW team is much larger than my Pooler CREW group - which consists of about 10 people! The nice thing about the larger group is that there are plenty of different paces. I think the whole time I ran, I was with someone or at least caught up to another person going my pace at the time. It's a good break from the Pooler neighborhoods my group runs during the week!

Anyway, we started out on running on the roads of Fort Pulaski and ended up on the Rails to Trails - which I'm not sure if I liked or not - it seemed to go on forever because the path looks the same all the way down. It was a nice path, though! Cute little crabs would run across the path every now and then! And it was shady for the most part. I miscalculated my distance to where I was supposed to turn around so I ended up running over 6.55 miles before I got back to the start. I decided to just go for 7 since I was feeling good and also, I like round numbers! It wasn't such a great run for my running mommas Katie and Jen, but we all have our off days... At least we got it done! :) Looking forward to the next Virtual Half! Maybe I will be able to do the entire 13.1 next time! [[I want to note that the day before, I had a spaghetti lunch and a French bread pizza dinner... and of course lots of water throughout the day. I also stretched out my hips, foam rolled my IT bands, and iced my right hip the night before...]]


My average pace for the 7 miles I did was high 10s - which was what I was aiming for on this long run. I think it was 10:47. Based off that run, I think I could probably keep that pace for 13.1 miles. And I'm sure I will only condition myself to get faster by the half in November. For 10:47 miles, I would be on pace to do a 2:21:15 half.... which is above my goal time (sub 2:30), but not quite my "secret" goal time - which is 2:20 (the time it took my little sister to run her first half last year). LOL! I'm excited to find out how I will do.

Me with my fellow Pooler CREW training group members - Chris and Amanda - after our Mock 5K

In other race news, my training group did a mock 5K last Thursday. I didn't do as well as I had hoped. I planned to do it in sub-30, which I did, but I BARELY made it! The night before, I had a rough bootcamp session, plus I had a couple beers without water after dinner AND I had not been getting much sleep at all last week due to a crazy deadline on a freelance project (very late-nights, and then getting up to work regular job at 8am). So yeah, I was in no position to be running any PRs. It was still fun though. :)

Time for sleep! Wake me up when it's August...