2018 Race Summary


2018 - 4th Quarter


2018 - 3rd Quarter


2018 - 2nd Quarter


2018 - 1st Quarter




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The Finish Line

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After 15 years of having fun (mostly) at the races, it's finally time for me to hang up my running shoes. The last race I blogged about was #574, but I ran two more after that: the Ocean Isle Beach Half Marathon on October 25, 2024, and the Police Donut 5k the following week on November 2, 2024. After the half marathon, I felt generally fine, but the following week, I began having some back pain. I managed to run the Donut 5k without too much of a problem and felt pretty good despite having to eat a half dozen donuts halfway through the race. The day after the donut race, I took the day off since my back was hurting, and my right leg had also become painful. To make a long story short, over the next couple of weeks, I became unable to walk or even stand without extreme pain. I ended up seeing an orthopedic surgeon, who did an MRI that revealed a stress fracture in my right tibia, and a spine doctor, whose MRI showed a severely pinched nerve at L4. I ended up in a wheelchair for the...
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Race #567 - Koala Bottle Harbison Half Marathon - Columbia, SC - 07/07/24

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Well, that was interesting. In my zeal to run at least 20 half marathons this year, I found this one at the last minute and signed up. It was only about 100 miles away, so I could click off another half marathon with just a couple hours of driving.  I signed up right away, not bothering to read the race description. The next day (the day before the race), I found out it was a singletrack trail complete with plenty of roots, rocks, and obstacles that a roadrunner like myself is not used to running.  It was hot and muggy, with a dew point of 75, although being a warm-weather runner, I'd prefer that over 40 degrees any day. Before hitting the actual trail, the race began on a dirt road, and I could have stopped to walk but decided to try to keep running until I saw someone else walking. The green lines on the graph below represent walk breaks, so you can see that I didn't take a walk break until I was more than 2 miles into the race. By about 5 miles into the race, I was done. I ...
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Race #570 - Asheville Half Marathon - Asheville, NC - 08/24/24

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This was my 14th half marathon this year, in a year that I'm hoping to run 20+. Unfortunately, as I write this a week after the race, I'm not feeling as gung-ho as I did when the year began. I'm already thinking of how miserable the cold weather races will feel, thus making it easy for me to back out in less-than-ideal weather conditions.  This was the first half marathon I ran on the comeback trail a year ago, but it was before I restarted the blog, so I only have my Garmin Connect and Strava data to help me remember it. I finished last year's race in 2:06:49, and this year, I was a little slower at 2:09:29, but I did finish 1st in the 70-74 age group this year as opposed to 2nd last year. The stat that stood out most to me is that this race had 913 finishers last year and only 503 this year! It's one of three half marathons that begin at Pack Square, and it's the only one of the three that also ends there. The other two end down along the river, so you don...
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Race #122 - Bunny Run 5k - Concord, NC - 04/23/11

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Since we first ran this race two years ago, it has more than doubled in size. This year 520 runners finished the Bunny Run 5k, the City of Concord's annual Easter race. Despite the name, which reminds me as much of an Easter egg hunt as it does a road race, it's a well organized race and is a lot of fun. The race used to be run on neighborhood streets along with a trip up the greenway, ending at the other park (I don't remember the name of it) about a mile away. That was a little bit of a problem in that when the race was over you were a mile away from your car if you parked near the starting line. This year, however, the course was changed to an out-and-back course up the greenway so that the starting line and finish line were at the same place, which resulted in not only a great improvement in parking logistics, but it eliminated all of the hills except in the final 100 yards or so at the end of the race. As the race began I was a little concerned that we were running d...
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Race #151 - Vulcan Run 10k - Birmingham, AL - 11/05/11

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It was an up and down week for a lot of runners this week -- they were either up in New York for the NYC Marathon or down in Georgia for the Savannah Marathon. We decided to take the road less traveled and headed over to the Vulcan Run 10k in Birmingham, Alabama, the third of ten races in the Running Journal Grand Prix series. This was our second trip to the Vulcan Run, and again we stayed at The Tutwiler Hotel , a beautiful and historic hotel built in 1914 that has been converted to a Hampton Inn. The Tutwiler is just 2 blocks from the starting line and 1 block from the finish line and is the perfect place to stay for this race. Their free breakfast is served from 6 to 10 a.m. so I had some oatmeal and orange juice before the race, then after the race I came in and took a shower and changed clothes and met Linda as she crossed the finish line, then we both went back and after she cleaned up we had some more breakfast then headed over to the awards ceremony and big after-race party a...
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