NorCal Half Marathon Report

 Coming off my PR at Salinas Valley, I entered the NorCal Half as part of the CA Marathon series.  3 races which will earn you a bonus medal.  I'm all about that, so I was in.

My ongoing hip problem has gotten a lot better with the latest round of acupuncture treatments, so I was confident I could come close and maybe even do another PR.  

NorCal Half was held right in downtown San Jose and was a mix of trail and city streets.  It was a smallish race for the size, about 2,000 Half and maybe 1500 full marathoners.

I stuck with my normal pre-race routine and noticed they had a 2:15 pace group.  This was right where I wanted to finish, so I figured I would hang around them and see what happened.

The start was prompt at 7:30 AM and wound its way along the SJ city streets (overlapping some of the San Jose RnR Half course) for 5.5 miles.  I stuck with the pace group pretty well, finding myself having to dial back a bit so I didn't drop them.  Only one major "hill" which was a freeway overpass.

The course then routed along the Guadalupe River Trail for the next 6 miles on an out-and-back.  This was a mix of trail and pavement.  The trail was really big rocks and dirt.  Not the best surface to maintain speed, especially in my minimalist shoes (making their race debut).  We hit the half turnaround at mile 9.5 and headed back. 

Gotta commend the pacers at this point in the race because around mile 11, I began to fade and I hung back to force myself to keep up with them.  At Mile 12, we were back on city streets and heading to the finish right on schedule.

At 12.5, I made a call, I had a shot for a PR if I dropped the group and went for it.  So that's what I did and burned out the final .6 miles.  Crossing the finish line in 2:14:02.  Another PR by 15 seconds!

My hip felt pretty good for a majority of this race, still not 100%, but not crippling me anymore either.  I have a pretty aggressive race schedule till the end of the year, so am hoping to survive it.

Next race is SJ RnR Half on Oct 2nd and then Morgan Hill Half on Oct 23rd.

Great to read all the other race reports and accomplishments on the board!

Brian
~350

Awesome job!!!

I love reading all the race reports too. How motivating!

sweet!  big congrats on the PR!  i hear ya about the bling, sometimes, it's all about the bling :)

Awesome Race! Glad the hip held up

I am the same way with the bling. We have a "challenge" down here where you do a half marathon on Oct 1, another half marathon on Thanksgiving, and a marathon on December 18, do all 3 races and you get a special " be tuff" medal. I did all 3 of these races last year and got nothing special, this year when I do all 3 races I will get a bonus medal, pretty cool.

 I'll get a double medal at Morgan Hill for doing NorCal and MH, then both races are part of another race series that ends in April.  So that's 2 bonus medals in all.  Plus I'll finish another race series in Dec.

I got one series for 2012 lined up too!

Brian

Medals and T-shirst!

Congrats on the PR.

It's great to hear that your hip is making progress.

Scott

 Yea if I took off about 6 months, I'd get injury free, but it drives me crazy to not be able to run, so dunno if I can do that just yet

Brian

Nice use of the pace group!

I was a volunteer at that race ... we handed ou****er and gatorade at mile 4. So you probably saw me unless you came by during the wave of people that totally overwhelmed us.

 Oh cool.  They had great volunteers there.  I usually don't stop at the early water stations, so I wasn't part of the rush :)

Brian

 It was interesting how the first runners hardly wanted anything, then lots of requests for water with a couple for Gatorade and the last people coming through looked dead and were desparate for Gatorade.