A whole bunch of hollerin and swallerin!

Oh I am ready to move!

I had the best time down in Nashville this weekend. The funny thing I realized about Nashville is that everytime I would bring it up, everyone mentions how much they love it, how fun the town is, what we should hit and on and on! Now I know why! That place is mad fun!

So back awhile ago I had decided that this spring I wanted to do a fun marathon and I had heard Nashville fit the bill so I signed up. Yet, after the tibia stress fracture set back over winter and so much time off I decided it wise to not try to build too quickly and just do the half.

I went back and forth with coach as to how I should run it. It was tagged as a B race on my calendar with my A Oly Rev 3 Knoxville race two weeks later. The plan was to run it as a training run for the half Quassy IM I am doing in June. Just wanted to run it as a training run and see how the hr trended to see if my pacing and effort would be on schedule and realistic for the half I wanted to run after a 1.2 m swim and 56 mile bike.

The Plan: Run 1st 5 miles at 7:45 pace
Run rest of the way at 7:30 pace

The Actual: Ran the first 5 at 7:38 avg pace
Ran the last 8+ at 7:13 avg pace
Garmin reflected 1:37:42 total time, 13.18 dist, 7:24 avg, avg HR 165

As a side note that I should not neglect, apparently I have never run a half marathon well. I was digging back through some of my results on athlinks and 1:40 and change a bunch of times but I had never even broke 1:40. So my little "training run" was even a PR! And the best part was I felt so good the entire time and was just taking it all in!

So here is the rest of the story.

We left out Friday morning about 7:30 am. It took us about 8 hours to get down there, then we hit the hotel, & hit the expo. I had a really nice conversation with the Saucony rep over at the expo and think I know what shoes I will try next...it was really nice to talk to someone so familiar with their shoes.

As a sidenote, I had received a new pair of shoes from Saucony Wednesday night, the Saucony Tangent 4's. My old racing shoes were wore out and I was nervous about wearing these without a proper break-in but without a lot of options, I set out to wear them anyways. I had wore them for an easy 2.5 mile treadmill run with some strides on Thursday and laced them up Saturday morning. And these shoes worked great for me! They were lighter than my old shoes and just felt fast. Oftentimes I seem to have issues with the balls of my feet going numb and thankfully no issues with these shoes and not even a blister! I LOVE THEM ALREADY!

Anyways so before we could leave the expo, we got a text to go to bar across the street and of course, we obliged. Great music, good beer (Yuengling on draft!) and friends. I love how everywhere down here has good live bands! We hung there for a bit and then headed to Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner and turned in early.

The next day I woke up waaay tooo early. I kept wondering where everyone was. It was not until 6:45 AM when I realized Nashville was an hour behind us and I still had another hour to wait! How did I miss that???? Anyways the threat of really bad weather (tornadoes, hail and storms) was the talk of the day and a big concern so the race was going to start early. Yeah as I thought it was starting an hour earlier already :-)

Race was awesome and it was even sunny. There was a good breeze and tons of spectators and AWESOME bands the whole way. I loved the course. I like hilly courses like this that mix it up, probably more so since I was not racing. Did I mention how nice it was to go to a destination race and NOT run a marathon and feel good when you are done? I am sooo used to always running a marathon and hurting so badly when I am done that this was such a nice change of pace!

Upon finishing, I left pretty quick as I wanted to change and shower. We killed some time at the hotel and headed out around 11:45 to commence pub crawl about the time the monsoon & the rest of the crazy weather rolled in. Oh what a day! Lots of laughs, good music, good beer and fun times hitting Big River Brewery, Tootsies, Big Rock with some of the Cleveland running gang and three of our high school friends that made it out!

The only question is, when can I go back there?????

Winner!

What is it with me and stupid pics?