G - day minus 145/ Frozen Half race report

There's nothing quite like waking up at 6:00 on a Saturday morning out of love. Most kids my age would be long asleep nursing hangovers, but not this guy. It was a 6:30 wake up call, which was later than I planned to wake up because my phone was set back an hour for some reason, but that was okay because I was set to leave my house at 7:30. I took a shower to wake up, had my typical race morning cup of tea and banana, stole a gel from my dad and was on my way. Check in was easy since there weren't that many people there, it still was a pretty good sized field though.

I met a bunch of my teammates in the skyway before and we went for a half mile or so warm up run. We ran on the sidewalks but it was real icy. I fell pretty spectacularly twice in a span of about 100 meters, then I decided to run on the roads- there were more runners than cars on the road before the race. Despite falling, I was feeling really good, so I just relaxed for the last half hour before the race and talked it up with the pace team. The race started, and it was windy with some rain, but other than that it was pretty warm.

I was wearing a Craft Wind Stopper long sleeve wicking top, with my TCRC singlet over that. On my legs I had on Brooks Wind Briefs, Paradox Running Tights, and my Nike Snake Shorts (I don't know what they're really called, but thats what the Run' N' Fun people called them, so we'll go with that.) Rounding out my attire was my wool trail socks under my Brooks Adrenaline 10's. The first three miles were pretty windy, but after that you ran into the riverbed where there are limestone bluffs on one side of Shepard Road and the Missisipi on the other, which blocked the wind pretty well; by this time I wasn't even noticing the rain. We came out of that wind tunnel, we could start to see the leaders come by on the other side of the road. It was pretty cool, we hooted and hollered and when I saw someone from my team I would high five him when he came by. The turnaround point was farther down the road than I thought it would be, it was near the first entrance to Hidden Falls park, right at the intersection with Cleveland Ave.

Going back was really boring, I was looking forward to running into the wind tunnel because the wind and rain were picking back up. The miles came really easy until mile 11 or so when Wes, who I was running with up until when dropped me when I pulled over to have a gel. After that the miles got really tough. There are some rolling hills up to Robert Street, and thus began the hardest half mile I've ran in a while. I haven't found an elevation chart, but I think the hill going up to the Securian building rises 300 or 400 ft over 200 meters. It was tough- my plan was not to run it.

As I made the turn on Robert Street, I started walking. There were two guys on the bottom of the hill, and here's how our conversation went:

Guys: "Come on big guy, over the top of that hill is salvation"

Me: "F--k that, that is not happening"

Guys: [almost dying laughing] "no, come on dude, make it your bitch"

So then I ran it, and then sprinted the rest of the course. I passed like 10 people in that half mile or so, which was pretty cool, although my legs felt like they were going to explode at any moment.

I had a couple blisters after my run, but that's because there was an unreal amount of water in the roads and it was bound to happen. Ironically, the last run ever in my GTS 10's I got my first ever blister in them. The only gripe I have with the race was that there were only 2 waterstops, and they gave out water bottles instead of cups which was pretty awkward.