The Calgary Marathon

I did my second half marathon on July 6th in Calgary, Alberta, Canada! http://www.calgarymarathon.com/ I did with a time of 2:09:25. A couple minutes slower than my first half marathon but I'm happy enough with it. I would have liked to done it a bit faster but I just couldn't get all the training runs in ahead of time and didn't really push hard enough, I don't think, now looking back on it. Plus there wasn't any crowd support like in the Dallas race. Hardly any people cheering you along and going through the stampede area, there were a ton of folks but they just looked irritated that they couldn't cross the road. I guess that support really helps. The elevation in Calgary is 3,000 feet higher than in Texas but the humidity is almost nill and the weather was in the high 50's so it was nice. Not as big as the last marathon but still about 6,000 folks overall for all the races. We only gained 900' elevation during the whole race but most was in the first mile where we went up 600'. We ran downtown, through the Calgary stampede area, through the zoo and then out along the Bow river. I did pretty well until I hit mile 10 and I could just feel myself slow down. My longest long run prior to this one was 9 miles so that pretty much explains it but also, at that point in the race was where we got to a part where you could see all the other folks in front of you coming back. We went almost 2 miles that way and I don't know, but if was just like, where is that turn around and I let that get to me, seeing all those folks coming towards me - in front of me and it seemed like forever! Once I hit the turn around, I had a little over 2 miles to go and it just felt better knowing it was the end so I sped up a bit there. My splits - mile 1 8:54, 2 - 8:33, 3 - 10:05 (long water stop?), 4 - 9:37, 5 - 9:54, 6 - 9:54, 7 - 9:51, 8 - 9:40, 9 - 9:35, 10 - 10:11, 11 - 10:17, 12 - 10:11, 13 - 9:36 last .37 - 8:32 - total 2:09:25. Garmin showed it at 13.37 miles.

I'm proud of Timo. He did his first full Marathon. He was shooting for 3:40. I figured it would be closer to 3:45-3:50. He did it in under 4 hours. 3:56. 26.2 miles. I can't even imagine. He was beat but did it. I never ran any super long runs so he did pretty good. He got 2nd in the under 19 age division! We got him Texas running shorts just for the occasion.
They gave out very nice technical running shirts to everyone and we got finisher's medals. Timothy's was a nice belt buckle and he got a 2nd place medal too. We are both international runners!!