Here is a story you ve heard from me recently: Today, I ran a race! Specifically, the half marathon event at the Longview Marathon and Half Marathon.

Here is another story you have heard from me a few times: Today, I set a new personal record for the half marathon, finishing in 1:18:47.77, a 6:01/mile pace, besting my previous official PR by 4 minutes and 26 seconds!¹

Here is a story you have not heard from me before — not recently, indeed not ever: Today, I won my race.

The Numbers

Officially:

• Time: 1:18:47.77
• Pace: 6:01/mile

Placing: first!

• 1/283 overall (top 0.35%)
• 1/113 men (top 0.88%)
• 1/45 men 30 – 39 (top 2.2%)

(Here is the Strava link for those of you who are there!)

This is even better than I would have guessed coming off of Boulderthon two weeks ago. I knew I could go a decent bit faster than that, given I had “gas left in the tank” and had done 16.2 mile. I did not think, 13 days ago, that I could do 7s/mile faster.

So… what happened?

Training and prep

Up through two weeks ago, my training and prep was, well, my training and prep for Boulderthon. Since then, I have done 80/20 Endurance’s two-week long-course bridge plan — using the effort (RPE)-based plan, because I used the RPE-based On Pace Level 3 plan for training all season. Given that there were only 13 days between the races, not a full two weeks, I needed to tweak that plan very slightly.

I chose to delete one foundation day in the first week, keeping the more intense workouts. That was probably a slight mistake. It would have been better to keep the foundation day and drop the workout, seeing as I also had another huge training stimulus: Boulderthon itself! I had done a 16-mile run at near-half-marathon-race-pace, which is a massive training stimulus — so massive you really should not do anything like it very often during training.

Food-wise, I ate fairly normally the first of those two weeks, and then pushed harder on maximizing the proportion of carbs again this week. Yesterday’s food intake was ~60% carbs — I have yet to figure out how to effectively hit 80% the day before a race as lots of folks recommend while still having a happy gut! — but that seems to be fine given I also had 55 – 60% carbs every day the rest of the week as well.

One interesting thing I observed over the past four weeks — including over both tapers — is that where I historically had significant problems not gaining weight, I am actually needing to be more careful right now not to lose weight. I need a bit more caloric intake than the estimates I am getting via Garmin and Apple Health are indicating. This is a very good problem for me to have, but I definitely need to keep iterating on it.²

Pre-race

This particular race was quite a ways away from where I live, but gladly I have friends who live in the area, including one of the guys I have known forever and been training-in-parallel-with the past few years. (I highly recommend this kind of “remote” training with friends. It has been hugely mutually encouraging for all of us.) He and his wife kindly let me crash on a couch at their place, so I drove up yesterday evening, hung out with them for a while, and then was in bed by a bit before 10pm. Normally, I would try to be in bed by 9pm, but this race started late — 8:30am, compared to the 6:30 or 7:00am starts I am accustomed to. I didn’t want to be sitting around twiddling my thumbs any more than I had to!

This morning, I got up, ate a reasonably-sized bowl of cereal and a banana, and — critically — drank only two ounces of coffee, unlike the six ounces I had before Boulderthon. That was perfect: just enough to stave off the caffeine headache I would otherwise have been nursing a few hours later, but not enough to upset my gut.

Because this race was a point-to-point, my friend and I drove my car down to the finish area, and then I rode with him back up where the race start area was. I picked up my bib, hit the bathroom, and then we just chilled out and chatted for another half hour or so. I steadily drank a fair bit of regular water and a fair bit of LMNT water: not so much to make me need to go to the bathroom on course (a worry at Boulderthon!) but enough to be well-hydrated even if and as it heated up a bit.

As we got to about 8am, I took two gels about 15 minutes apart: an AMACX Cassis Turbo Gel and an AMACX Strawberry Drink Gel. My plan was literally to trust my gut — if I was having any stomach discomfort whatsoever, I would skip the caffeinated gel and take only the strawberry drink gel. In the event, my stomach felt fine, so I took both. Cutting the coffee really seemed to help. I hit the bathroom one last time (seriously: no repeats of the problems I had at Boulderthon!) and then spent a bit warming up. Then it was go time!

Race

The race was an order of magnitude smaller than Boulderthon: just a few hundred people. As we waited to start, I was eyeing the other runners near the front, trying to get a sense of what the field was like. I knew from checking previous years’ results that depending on who showed up today, I might be in the running to win, or it might not even be close. (Last year, for example, today’s great-for-me time would have had me finish 4th.) I started to get the sense that I probably didn’t have a lot of competition, but you never know until you’re actually racing.

We started, and within about half a mile I started getting pretty strong evidence that my read was correct. People were (wisely!) dropping back and holding a much slower pace than I was, and I could tell from his breathing that the one guy who started out hanging with me was pushing too fast, and he figured out the same and dropped back behind me fairly quickly as well. By the end of the first mile, I was running very much alone, just chasing the course guide (he on rollerblades, which I had not seen before!). From that point forward I just steadily opened up my lead on everyone else; by mile 4 or so I was extremely confident that as long as I didn’t blow up, I had the race locked up, because everyone else was a minute or more behind me and I was gaining on them.

I had never been in that position before, and the excitement led me to make my one mistake of the race: pacing-wise, I pushed a bit too fast. This is one of those funny things that you can know intellectually but only experience can actually teach you. Up until today, I have only ever even had race position as a consideration once: in a trail half marathon back in 2019. In that case, the guy who won pulled away enough that I knew I was not going to catch him, and I was struggling so much to just keep going that thinking about racing the guy behind me was not even on my mind.

Net, I got excited and ran just a little bit too fast on the first mile and a handful of the other miles in the first half of the race. Not wildly too fast. Maybe two or three seconds per mile on a couple key miles. That was just enough, though, that I ended up with some positives splits at the end instead of negative splits like I was hoping for. Even so, as I review the data after the fact, my pacing today was quite good, despite not feeling like it at the end, and despite losing a little time on those last few miles.

Things got tough in the final 5K, which meant I had run the rest of it hard enough. I kept repeating two things to myself:

• “Redemption”: the whole point of doing this race was to get back what I missed at Boulderthon two weeks ago. When things started hurting, I would just remind myself that this was the reason I was pushing.

• “Don’t leave anything on the course.” At Colfax in the spring, and at Colorado Springs last year, I knew I left potential time on the course. That was fine for those races, in that I was working above all at following my race plan, and did so successfully in the main.

As I got to the end, both of those ringing in my mind, I pushed. The friend who I stayed with cheered me on as I hit the last tenth of a mile. My legs had very little left in them, but they had just enough to kick hard and make that last stretch the fastest I ran all day. I saw the clock as I crossed the finish line, telling me I had broken 1:18:50. I stopped my watch and tried to breathe. My friend came over and congratulated me and I tried to respond, but eventually gave up and just said “I can’t breathe yet.” He laughed and gave me a few to recover.

A full four minutes later, the next runner came in for the half, followed relatively quickly by the guy in third. I got some fruit and juice and one of the pancakes they had as post-race food. (Pancakes: an excellent call which would be nearly impossible to pull off for the thousands of runners at something like Colfax or Boulderthon, but which a small race like this can totally manage!) Then I hung out with my friend until it was podium time! The race had some nice small prizes (1st got a $25 gift card to a local running store) and plaques indicating your place. The plaque is absolutely going on some wall somewhere!

I liked winning a race. I don’t expect it to be a regular thing, simply because I am not fast enough for it to be — again, if I had been racing last year’s field with my current fitness, I would not have even been on the podium, much less first. But you race the field you race, and winning a race is winning a race. It counts. I am incredibly proud of today’s work: because I won, but even more so because I did not leave anything on the course, and because I really did make this season count for an official time with which I can be profoundly satisfied.

What’s next?

I am going to take this whole next week off — no running at all. I can feel that my body is at the limit of what it can do before I start risking injury or overtraining. The two-week bridge between Boulderthon and today told as much very clearly, with extra fatigue, legs that required a lot of extra stretching and foam rolling to be okay, and so on. This break does not need to be a big one, from what I can tell, but it needs to be a true break.

After the week off, I plan to hop into a 12-week maintenance/off-season plan, which will start at about half my peak pre-race volume and build back up to ~the normal starting volume, and then I think I’m going to run the Denver Colfax Marathon in May. (I have not committed yet, but that is my inclination!) I might sprinkle in a Thanksgiving 5K or something like that just for fun, but now till early January my plan is just easier work and some consistent strength training.

I think I could definitely hit sub-2:50 and hopefully with a good training cycle sub-2:45 even at a mile high, and better at sea level. I’m tentatively planning to hit the Boulderthon Half again in the fall, but I am also mulling on whether I want to see if some friends and I cannot pick a good (big!) sea level half instead and see what I can in a half on a flat course not at 5,000 feet of elevation. All of that is still up in the air! We will see what 2025 brings. If today ends up being the best run of my life, I might be a bit disappointed never to have surpassed it — but I will also remain incredibly proud of it.

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Notes

1. Two weeks ago at Boulderthon, I covered the actual on-course distance in ~1:19:57, or a ~6:06/mile pace, so I ran about 5s/mile faster today than that section. ↩︎

2. Unfortunately, I do not find satiation to be a sufficiently reliable guide to be able to rely on it, despite having spent quite a bit of time working at it over the past year. I have quite consistently found that eating to satiation leaves gaining or losing weight in undesirable ways, with no particular rhyme or reason to which from what I have been able to work out so far! ↩︎