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Chicago Spring Half Marathon: My 1st Half Marathon

If you would've told me that I'd be running a half marathon today last year, I would've told you you were crazy…. It was never in my radar and running had always been something I disliked ever since high school…
But on Sunday, May 18, 2014, my alarm went off at 4:00am to get ready for my first half marathon. After only 4 hours of sleep, I was exhausted. I shot a 13 hour wedding the previous day and I knew going into the race that it would be like this… so the day has finally come. After 12 weeks of training using Hal Higdon novice half marathon and Nike Plus Coach, I was ready for my first half. Or so I thought I was…
I've read so many articles leading up to this race on how to prepare and what to do, what not to do, and with the help of My E3 girls as well, I was more than ready… But guess who woke up at 4am on race day not knowing what she's going to wear, what nutrition she's going to bring, what she's going to eat before the race… this girl! Ugh. Race day seriously snuck up on me. I thought I had more time than I had and next thing you know, here I was, an hour before I had to head to the city.
I somehow managed to figure out what to wear, although, I wish I made a better choice on my race top. I mean, who wears a horizontal striped shirt to a race?! haha.. So we (my sister-in-law, Mia and I) arrived at our designated corral on time. Surprisingly, I wasn't as nervous as I was in previous races. I'm not sure if it was because I was too tired to be nervous, but I actually was relatively calm compared to past races. The Chicago Spring Half Marathon was a much smaller race than I've ever ran before. There were only about 4k runners vs. 40k runners in the past (Shamrock Shuffle, Hot Chocolate).
After about 20 minutes of waiting in our corral, I can finally see the "start" line. Holy.crap.it's.really.happening… After weeks of training, it's all coming down to how I'm going to perform this day. I've been training at a pace of 10:30/mi to 10:45/mi pace and all I was hoping for was a sub 2 hours and 30 minutes...

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