Surfside Beach Half Marathon

After my rough outing at the Chevron Houston Marathon, I decided I needed a little bit of redemption. The Surfside Beach Half Marathon was four weeks after the big race in Houston so it provided the perfect opportunity. The only thing that had me a little concerned about this race was that it is run completely on the beach. Over the next four weeks, I took two weeks of easy runs to recover. Then, the next two weeks I stepped it up and did a little bit tougher runs, but still pretty easy compared to what I had been doing the past couple of months. I knew I could finish, but I didn't really know what to expect since I had concentrated more on the recovery aspect the past four weeks.

Saturday morning, I woke up early to head down to the beach to pick up my packet and race. I got there plenty early, and it was a good thing. The later you arrived, the farther you had to park from the start line. I made the ten minute walk to pick up my packet, and the walk to put my stuff in my car and back. I felt like I was warm and ready to race just from all of that.

The race started right on time. I had planned to run a nice easy 8:00/mile pace since I didn't know what it would be like running on the sand. It turned out the sand was packed except right at around 2.4 miles. After that, I began to pick up the pace a little bit. My goal for the race was 1:45:00. It began to be obvious that I would have no problem hitting this mark. With about 3 miles left, I did the math, and I would be a lot closer to 1:40:00 than 1:45:00. However, there was no way I could get under 1:40:00 so I let off the gas a little to conserve some energy for Texas Independence Relay the next weekend.

I finished with a new personal best time of 1:42:39. This wasn't too hard considering my resume only includes one other half marathon, and conditions that day were horrible. These were nearly perfect conditions. I had a great time running on the beach, and I will definitely plan to do this race again. I've even considered going back down to Surfside for a weekend run sometime. Hopefully, next year, I can stick around for the post race meal. It looked and smelled delicious.