Race report

A rather absurdly full and rambling report on the half-marathon at the main blog.

The only other thing I have to add: I have to strive to be less self-critical. Really I am very pleased with my time for this race--sub-2:00 mattered to me, and I made it with time to spare (1:59:07). But I can't stop thinking about how much faster I should be able to run! This is absurd. I have had a lifetime of being a terrible, terrible athlete. I was always pretty much the worst at everything--unfit, untalented, uninterested. It is amazing that I am now solidly middle-of-the-pack, though the trick is to think of this as an incitement to further work rather than a way of letting myself off easily.

I think I could get to (as it were) the front of the middle if I keep working!

But it is also a bit of a triumph, in a way it wouldn't be for someone with a long history of athleticism, to have made it this far. So that my race results today put me as 1680 out of 3720 overall, and 521 out of 1719 among the women only. This is highly respectable. I think that the people who do triathlons are probably all round fitter than the people who do NYRR races, it will be sensible for me to aim at hitting right in the middle of the women's results--I would think this is about where I will fall once I get the cycling thing more under control, and practice some transitions. And I will strive to improve on that, but not in a self-scourging kind of way!