Sunday I ran the Hottest Half Marathon in Dallas, as determined by you the people in my poll.  To get it out of the way, I was promised hot, and it was hot.  Ohhh it was hot.

Start: ~84 feels like 90 | Finish: ~90 feels like 99

But let’s back up a bit.  Ev, Hazel, and I loaded up into the car Saturday morning to hit up Big D.  Without an expo or other pre-race activities, we checked into our super-dog-friendly hotel and immediately headed out to a dog park.  Turns out the dog park was along the race route, for an added bonus.

We three musketeers set out Sunday morning to pick up my race packet and prepare for the out-and-back course.  I got a good luck kiss and lick and jogged over to the starting block.  At 7:30am, after an almost secretive “ready…”, “set…”, we hear “GO!”  My original goal was a not-too-taxing 7:50 min/mile pace for the race.  That’s not exactly how things played out.

In what I’ll presume was a rebellion of my subconscious to get this over with as quickly as possible, I blasted out the first two miles in 7:18.  Mile 3 was a leisurely 7:24, so I sped back up to a 7:20 4th mile.  Overall through 9 miles, my slowest was 7:31. Unfortunately it was in Mile 10 where the wheels started to fall off.  Since it was an out-and-back, the water / Gatorade stops were doing double duty and drying up fast.  I ended up walking through a water stop just before mile 11, and another time just before mile 12.

As I was approaching the finish I saw my cheering squad on the sidelines wagging their tails.  Ev had Hazel all ready to go about 30 yards from the finish for me to grab the leash, but in my state of delirium I didn’t connect the dots fast enough to realize I should grab the leash and cross the finish with her.  Alas, maybe next time!

I grabbed my medal, a kiddie-size Jamba Juice, and a bottle of water and moseyed over to meet the team.  Hazel insisted on wearing my medal (below), and made a I-have-to-sneeze face after hearing how far I ran for that little piece of metal.

Hazel's face is her reaction to hearing how far I ran for that medal

Overall, the race was a lot of fun!  I’ll even consider doing it again next year, without changing very much of the plan.  The heat was a big factor late in the race, but I’m proud of how long I was able to hold it off before it got to me.  I’ll attribute a lot of that success to training in Texas through the summer.  I even finished relatively high in the field, within the top 5% of all finishers!

*The race was obviously 13.1 miles, but that’s only if you run the absolute shortest distance possible.  With all the bobbing and weaving I did, the total distance (per my Garmin) came out to an extra .18 miles.