Life... According to the Feeser's: Gettysburg Half Marathon

Back in September I ran my first marathon. I am very glad that I did it even finishing under five hours. The only problem with the marathon is the large volume of time that it takes to train for the event, namely four & five hour runs on the weekends in addition to lengthy runs during the week. For me that is just too much time with all the things that we have going on especially the boys. However, I have also found that distance running is something that I enjoy. So what to do? Enter the half-marathon. The perfect distance race for my life right now.

Returning from a trip to Gettysburg I stumbled onto a website for the inaugural running of the Gettysburg Blue-Gray Half-Marathon on 30 October. I decided to sign up and we would make it a family trip. We left after lunch on Saturday to travel up there. This just happened to be the first winter storm of the season. Yay!

Weather on the trip up.

As we drove up it was pretty nasty and we considered turning around but at that point we were as close to our destination as we were to home so we pushed through. We knew that the weather was supposed to be great on Sunday so if we just got to Gettysburg then we would be OK. I picked up my race bag, took the family to dinner and then we settled in for the night with some Food Network.

Sunday morning from the hotel

Waking up on Sunday, they had delayed the race start by an hour to 0900 to allow the roads to be prepped. It was a great decision as the roads were in perfect shape and the weather was beautiful.

Waiting on the start

Ready to start

The man with the starter gun...Nice touch!

So with a gorgeous backdrop of snow and a cloudless sky we set off. I found a nice, easy pace that I could maintain and managed to finish in 2:09:41. Way better than I had thought and even managed to beat the family to the finish line before they made it back from the hotel room.