Sunday I finally ran my first Half-Marathon! While I don’t have any other Half-Marathons to base my comparison, but this is so far my favorite race I’ve done.

The day before this race, we were spending some time in Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure park just enjoying rides as well as picking up our bib and packets. By the late afternoon I was limping! My left hip was hurting on every step. So we took the rest of the day at an easy lazy pace and rested. Just before bed was when all the nervousness and panic started to set in for us. We pinned our bibs to the shirts, packed our gels and filled our water bottles. Checked and double checked all our belongings and ensured our iPod’s were charged. And we did all this at a frantic pace. I really wish we had someone just filming us because as we looked back that was as crazy as we’ve ever gotten.

The morning of the race we braved through a huge delay to enter the parking structure and finally found ourselves with the 10,000+ other runners eager to get underway. The sun was just about to rise it was about 5:30am at this point but Disney had pulled out all the stops with the music pumping and searchlights filling the skies. The race officially started at 6:00am but our corral, “G” didn’t cross until closer to 6:25am.

Susana was our official photographer and had a great vantage point above the start area and go some awesome shots of the streets filled with runners. As we passed under the bridge we were able to spot her and wave. To my surprise about 100′ later I saw my sister yelling and waving from the sidewalk! I had tried calling her the night before to no avail but she still made it in time to catch the start!

The beginning of the race took us through both Disney’s California Adventure and Disneyland. While the scenery was of course, ideal, the race course itself was quite difficult as the pack of runners was still quite large and dense and the course took us through some narrow entrances and pathways. It was somewhere in here that my iPod decided to end my Nike+ workout and I had to restart the workout for the remainder of the race, (hence the two Nike+ graphs below.)

After the parks we took to the streets of Anaheim for the remaining 9 miles. This actually went by much faster than I anticipated. It was these 9 miles which made this race one of best I’ve ever run, there were spectators and cheer’ers gathered almost the entire length of the course! High school bands and cheereleader troups; Mariachi bands and Hula Dancers were strategically placed what seemed like every mile and really helped to keep the race moving along and kept me motivated to push on through.

Coming in to the Finish line was a very surreal moment. The final leg took us through Downtown Disney, which with its tall buildings on either side rushing by made me feel like I was sprinting much faster than I know I was. And it was here, again that I was surprised by Susana, Marcela and my sister Kris cheering me on from the side! (Marcela had finished the race about 50 Minutes before me, She actually trained properly.)

Limping through the finisher’s area, I received my medal and snacks and hobbled back to my friends to cheer on Clark, the 3rd in our troop.

All in all a great race and a great day… later that same day however was the Nike Human Race 10K in Los Angeles. After some napping and stretching Marcela, Susana, and I geared back up to run that race as well. I’ll share that in the next post.

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