Running with the Cows Half Marathon

I completed my third and final half marathon over the weekend at the Running of the Cows Half Marathon. My main goal was to improve on my time from my previous two half marathons, but I also had a pretty strong desire to finish in under 1:40. While that isn't record breaking speed, it was a challenging but attainable goal I wanted to meet. It still blows my mind that the people winning these events are finishing in around the 1:10 mark and the fastest half marathon ever run was below 1:00. To end any curiosity about how I did I'll mention that I did break the 1:40 mark, so I was quite content with how things went. I think my official time for the event was 1:39:29, but it turned out to be longer than a half marathon by 1/10 of a mile. Therefore, based on my Garmin I found that I ran the actual half marathon distance in 1:38:54. I'll again say that this is quite slow by some standards, but I was pretty content considering my lack of true running training. I did get in a fair amount of running, but with my primary focus being biking I never worked in any kind of focused training (intervals, hills, etc) that would have really led to improvements. Something that pleased me with this last half marathon was my splits during each of the 13.1 miles. My fastest mile was the third mile, which was likely because of a generous downhill area. But other than that my splits were faster with each passing mile. In other words, I ran faster as the event progressed. This seemed to work quite nicely since I was able to ease into things rather than starting fast and blowing up like I did in the Kansas Half Marathon. The main goal of this entire treble of half marathons was to simply aid in building up some endurance to help with biking, so hopefully I'll find that it was a success. In other news, this past week I was offered and I accepted a job at Park University here in the Kansas City area. My contract will start in August and my official title will be Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences. This university is a great fit for me since their relative emphasis on teaching, research, and service match my interests quite well, so I'm excited for how things will develop. Now I just need to finish up that pesky PhD in St. Louis.