running isn't hard.

On Saturday, we had an experience (the first in a long time) where I thought, "hmm. I should blog about that." so here I am. yay blogging.

Have you ever said to yourself, on any given day during the offseason (read: untrained), "I wonder if I tried to run a race TODAY, if I'd be able to do it, and how fast I could do it in"?

yeaaaahhh...

At the beginning of the summer, dice and I decided that we were going to train for the Kansas City marathon and that we were going to go all aggressive and run an awful damn lot over the summer. That worked, up until about... oh, late July or so? so that was fun while it lasted. Life got busy and we got tired of having to wake up before work to run 12-milers and all of a sudden there was a day very early in the football season when Josh said, "well, we could just not run our long run today and drop to the half marathon." and I was all, "does that mean we can watch football and drink beer all day instead of worrying about having to run tonight?" and then suddenly a 6-pack of Oberon magically disappeared into my belly.

It was awesome.

We then proceeded not to run - like, pretty much AT ALL - for the next two or three months. I did Dances with Dirt with Mo and the crew on September 6th, but there was pretty much no running for about a month up until that point. And then dice and I ran about three or four miles... oh, three times or so in the last few weeks, just to make sure our legs actually functioned and all that.

But for all practical purposes, we pretty much hadn't trained for the past 2.5 months. I think my last "longish" run took place the first week of August.

And yes, we could have decided to just not do the race at all, but running isn't hard. especially if it's only a measly half marathon. plus, there was a $25 gift certificate for barbeque. mmm. barbeque.

I digress.

So we ran the Kansas City half marathon on Saturday. We were expecting it to be really, really hard, and we were expecting to run super, duper slow. And we were slow, don't get me wrong. I think the half-marathon split for my first marathon ever (read: SLOW) was faster than our time. BUT! we ran the entire thing. the course wasn't nearly as difficult as I was expecting it to be (everyone had told me how HILLY! it is). and we pretty much had a blast.

A family friend of Josh's picked up our packets, so I didn't realize until race morning that I had been assigned a full marathon number, despite both of us having switched to the half (I even have the receipt in my email... grrr..). Otherwise, race morning wasn't too bad. It was so totally stress-free because we knew we didn't really care about our time and we had planned to use a run-walk method if necessary so we weren't too worried about overexerting ourselves.

We got downtown and parked about 20 minutes before we were supposed to start. (yay for not caring!) We parked literally about two blocks away from the start, so that was awesome. I got to use nice, indoor, heated bathrooms instead of the port-o-johns before the race. And when we finally meandered our way over to the start, we found that we were just in time to take off with everyone else.

We headed through the Power and Light district for a while and went by a place where some friends had a wedding reception last year. Then we slowly made our way to liberty memorial where we headed up a decent climb and then ran around the memorial a bit. I turned to Josh and said, "so, is that like the 3rd or 4th hardest hill?" and he was like, "no, that was the hardest one. the rest aren't as bad as that one." and I was all, "uh... that wasn't that hard, so this will be awesome." I'd put the hill level pretty much on par with the Flying Pig in Cincinnati. There are a lot of rollers (which to me are a lot of fun) and there are two steep-ish climbs around Liberty Memorial, and then there's a decent gradual climb around mile 10, but then otherwise it really wasn't difficult. I'm not sure you really need hill training to manage them. shit, I'm proof that you don't even really need ANY training to manage them. I think the mile that we ran with the hardest hill was about 10 seconds slower than our other miles at the beginning of the race (we negative split, BIG TIME). Granted, by the time the last incline came, I turned to Josh and said, "where's the fucking downhill, eh?" But... well, yeah. I think I'd probably chalk that up to my general "not being in shape"-ness rather than the hill.

I was pretty much comparing it to Detroit the entire way, and one thing that really didn't compare at all was the fact that there was pretty much no crowd support. I mean, like none. It was abysmal. I thought it was kind of funny that a ton more people come out to watch in Detroit (which, you know, is SO! INCREDIBLY! DANGEROUS!) than do in Kansas City. (Did I mention we parked for free? that's unheard of!) Kansas City's course was beautiful, though, I had to give them that.

The only other things to note were that Dice's parents came out to cheer for us at about the half-way point (which, by the way, was totally awesome of them), and we decided that since we were taking it easy that we'd take the opportunity to go give them a hug and say hi quickly. They yelled at us to keep going. :) Also, the finishing chute was horrible. It bottlenecked horribly. And then we had to wait around in the finisher's chute for literally about 20 minutes before we could get through the food line. it was horrible, especially because it was kind of chilly out and most of us weren't dressed to be standing around after getting all sweaty.

All in all, I was really happy with the race. We finished just a tad over 2:17, which translates to about a 10:30 pace, I think. Not too shabby, I'd say. We spent the entire afternoon reiterating that running isn't hard and laughing that we had actually managed to accomplish what we had that morning.

Just think what we could do if we actually TRAINED for a consistent period of time...