I ran in my first marathon yesterday morning. Well it was just a half-marathon, but 13.1 miles is still a pretty long way to run. Here are my stats:

bib number: 7902
age: 31
gender: M
location: Moorhead, MN
overall place: 1011 out of 3682
division place: 108 out of 242
gender place: 636 out of 1514
time: 1:58:28
pace: 9:03
gun time : 2:01:01

I learned a couple things in the process of running my very first marathon.

1. Get new shoes. I ran in some tennis shoes that were probably 10 or more years old. I had terrible blisters on my right foot when I was done. Luckily my mind wasn’t feeling anything before I crossed the finish line because walking was very painful when I was done.

2. Learn to pace myself. We had pacers until the half and full marathons split courses. After that I just kept passing people, but somewhere around mile 10 or 11 people started passing me. The last 2 miles were brutal.

My goal was to do it in 2 hours – so I’ve quite happy with my time! Maybe next year I’ll actually train for it and try to knock off some of that time.

Here I am coming up – I’m in the blue shirt black shorts:

And Luke clapping for me after he eventually did pick me out of the crowd.