Cowtown Half-Marathon

The 2008 Cowtown Runs drew quite a large crowd. With 3,200 kids and almost 2,000 adults completing the 5K, another 2,000 each for the 10K and half-marathon and 685 and 117 finishers for the marathon and ultramarathon respectively, there were almost 10,000 runners crossing the various finish lines and probably over 12,000 runners competing in all the events.

Personally, I had a great race at the 2008 Cowtown half-marathon today. I didn't quite make my goal time of under 1 hour and 50 minutes; however, I still set a PR (personal record) of 1:51:23 with a pace right at 8:30/mi for the 13.1 miles. This is two minutes faster than the Mote In Motion half-marathon back in November and that course was flatter/faster and before the knee injury. Yes, progress!

I started off by joining a fellow RVG runner, Richard, for the first eight miles - until he had to split off to do the full marathon. My pace up to that point was around 8:51/mile, which was disappointing at the time since I had to run 8:23/mi to do a 1:50 half-marathon. Actually, it turned out that 8:51 was a pretty good pace because, as you can see from the elevation chart below, the first two-thirds of the race was mostly uphill. (The half-marathon and full marathon courses were identical up until about mile 8.3 and they rejoined at mile 11.1/24.3 to the finish line).

After the half/full split, the course was downhill until about mile 11 which was a nice reprieve and gave my heart rate a chance to drop before my final push at the end.



My time was good enough for 49th out of 157 in my age group, 317 out of 1068 males, and 410 out of 2033 finishers. I'm definitely getting better.
Full results at http://results.active.com/pages/page.jsp?eventID=1548190.
My personal result page at http://results.active.com/pages/oneResult.jsp?pID=32956735&rsID=59627

I really enjoyed this race. We had nice weather, the crowds were big enough to be festive but not so crowded as to be annoying, and the course was decent despite the hills. The expo and after-race refreshments were quite substantial and we got a nice medal after crossing the finish line. I look forward to doing the full marathon at next year's Cowtown.