I felt great leading up to this year’s White Mountain Half Marathon. My paces were right where I wanted them to be and generally felt great. The day of this year’s race it was a shy under 50 degrees which was perfect for a race.

How it Went

The first 5 miles went exactly as I wanted them to. My splits were between 7:48-8:07 per mile. I have been battling side cramps for some time as I think I’ve pulled some muscles in my core. I felt a cramp coming on around mile 5. As my nutrition plan for this race was one Clif Blok every mile, I was out of my orange flavor by mile 6 (there are six in each sleeve). I switched to my 3x sodium margarita flavor for miles 7-12. I’ve gotten into the habit of switching to these later in a race as it does seem to knock out cramps quickly and brings life back into my legs.

As I expected, by mile 8, I started feeling the cramp go away and legs felt better. As I had favored that side for several miles, my legs and core were tensed and added fatigue impacting my stride. I held on to respectable 8:11/mile splits for miles 9 and 10. But, I started to lose my form around mile 11.5. Mile 12 into 13 I slowed WAY down. The final kicker of a hill didn’t help either. I just couldn’t tick over the legs as fast as I wanted to through the finish. But all things said, I was still pleased with my performance. My wife and kids were waiting at the finish line cheering me on and the little monkeys finished the race with me. And yes, they were quick to point out that they beat me to the finish line.

Lessons Learned

This was the first race I ran with my Garmin Forerunner 910XT. Last year I was running with a Garmin Forerunner 410. With each device comes different levels of “accuracy”. I have the Garmin autolap every mile. The first few miles, the Garmin 910 was fairly close to the mile marker signs on the course. The watch would beep and I’d be 5 seconds away from the mile marker. Not too bad. But, as the race went on, the watch would beep and I’d be more like 10-15, then 15-20 seconds away from the mile marker. This meant that I was actually running a bit slower than the watch led me to believe. Given how the body felt, I’m not sure that a more accurate device like my old 410 would have resulted in a faster time, but it was interesting to see the difference in logged mileage and instant time. I don’t plan on running with a different watch any time soon so I’ll be training with this watch for the foreseeable future. I’m considering switching off the autolap feature and recording the laps manually when I see the signs. This would mean the instant feedback on pacing would be slightly less accurate, but I’ll know what my true lap splits are.

Another lesson learned is this is the second time I’ve used the 3x sodium Clif Bloks during an event. Like the White Mountain Gran Fondo, these suckers knocked out the cramping pretty quickly. I’m sold.

One last thing…I somehow managed to place third in my age group. I’m not sure how this was possible, but interesting. First and second in the age group 1:21:30 and 1:23:55, respectively. They finished third and fifth overall. Curiously, I finished in 81st place with a final time of 1:47:34. I’m not sure where all the age groupers went this year, but it was an interesting find in the results.

Full results are posted here.

Ride Name: 
Distance: 0 mi
Elevation Gain: 0 ft
Moving Time: 04:51:46
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