A wonderful 5 days & Austin Half Marathon Race Recap

Riding home from a very enjoyable trip out of town. I headed to San Antonio with my parents last Wednesday for my TMEA conference. We had a blast. Not only did I attend some great music teacher sessions, but got to spend some quality parent/daughter time together!

I also got to meet up with some of my Gamma sisters for dinner, and it was so wonderful catching up and celebrating the soon-to-be Mommy, Ashley!

Mike picked me up in San Antonio on Saturday, and then he and I continued on to Austin to check in for the Austin Half Marathon on Sunday.

We got to the Palmer Event Center and made our way around the massive expo. Ran into some friends too!

Mike and I had a late lunch at Shady Grove and enjoyed the beautiful weather.

Had dinner at North in The Domain with friends we were staying with. It was delicious!

Race Recap:

Wake up call was 5:00am. Not bad! Got ready and had a Bonk Breaker for breakfast. We drove and parked in the capital (because we had the hookup 😉) then headed out to the start line.

We kinda separated to find the pacers we wanted to run with. I hooked up with Alyse at the 4:00 marathon pacers, which said about 9:00 min miles (give or take).

The National Anthem was sung and then we were off! I had my Wahoo heart rate monitor synced up and figured I’d use that as my mile pacer to notify me. However, it never talked to me the whole time! I didn’t want to mess with it since it was playing my music, so I decided I’d run this race based on feel.

I think that was a good decision because before I knew it, we were passing the 5k mark, 5 mile mark, 8 mile mark; they were just flying by!

Alyse kept me on my toes; she’s so fast! And those hills were killer! The first super steep one was at mile 8. I’m not sure if my hill running technique was right (because I have absolutely no hills to train on at home) but I leaned into them and took long strides. Somehow that did the trick.

We got to the famous mile 12 killer hill and turned it up! That hill is quite a beast, but I did NOT want to walk. And I didn’t!

Once I saw the back of the capital I started booking it (the finish line was around front of the capital). Ran my heart out through the finish!

My goal was to do better than I did last year. Last year’s time was 1:58. Sadly, not only did my heart rate monitor not track, but my race bib didn’t register over all of the trackers throughout the race! Frustrating, but I figured out my time because I remember running through the start line at 6:00 minutes and the finish said 2:01. So with a little simple math, I figured I finished in 1:54! I’ll take that!