7 Weeks to go.

• I did a Half-Marathon practice race this past Saturday night. It was basically and out and back on the Springwater trail, heading East first then into the Sunset back towards the river after the turn around. It was nice and unique to run a race Saturday evening instead of the usual early Sunday morning race slot. 
• My goal was to keep on my marathon pace as much as possible. It's hard to fight that urge at the start of the race and take off like when you're a kid at school racing your friends. The race actually had 'pacers' for mile times that had signs and would be running the race too. I positioned my self between the 8:00 and 9:00 min per mile pacers. I quickly caught up to the 8:00 pacers and realized I was going to fast and outside of my goal. So i forced my self to slow down and I wouldn't let myself pass the 8;00 pacers. I actually drifted back a bit after a few miles. Then a bit after mile 4, I got caught at a stop light and had to wait for the cross walk signal. 
• Everything went pretty good, the race started to thin out after the the turn around point. I got past by with about 2 miles to go. So I decided to follow him in and pick up my pace a little. Then when I were about 1/2 mile out the old feeling of being in a race kicked in, so I kicked it in and sprinted to the finish. 
• I managed to place 7th for my division and 3rd for my age group. That was a great confidence boost for my training. Considering I treated most of this race as a tempo run and probably could have gone faster if this was my goal of a half-marathon. But as I know I have to run twice this in 7 weeks.