The Trenton Half Marathon

Last Saturday Alison and I ran our second half marathon in a month (and second half marathon of our lives), The Innaugural Trenton Half Marathon in... where else... Trenton, NJ.  Our home town.  Now, Trenton gets a pretty bad rap from the media thanks in part a corrupt mayor and the History channel show Gangland, but aside from all that it really is a pretty cool place.  The history around there is awesome.  George Washington chilled in Trenton for a significant period of time during the Revolutionary War.  There are buildings still standing there that date back to the 18th century.  Loyalists and Patriots were shooting muskets at each other in three piece suits (cuz that's what soliders wore back then) in and around Trenton.  And it's pretty if you really take a second to stop and look at it. 

All that being said, despite living there for 23 of my 26 years of life, I never got a chance to look at it like I did last Saturday.  And armed with a running partner whose actual job title is "Historian" (so cool), I got my own private walking running tour. 

As for the actual race, it got off to a bit of a late start (around 45minutes late), but other than that it was really awesome.  They kept the course interesting.  It crossed two bridges, a few miles were in a completely different state, it went through a beautiful (albeit VERY hilly) park, down the cobblestone streets of the historic district, and the home stretch was literally that.  A home stretch from third base to home plate at a minor league baseball stadium.  So cool.  Granted, a majority of the race was running down highway 29, but even that runs along the Delaware River, so, hey, water views!  I must say though the best part of this race is that Alison and I absolutely KILLED it time-wise.  I beat my previous (and only) half marathon time by almost five whole minutes, clocking in at 2:03:48.  Somehow Alison (the jerk) beat my by two seconds even though we were running side by side the entire race, but oh well.  That time made me think it might be possible for me to finish a half sub-2 hours, but we'll have to wait a while to see for that one, as the Disney Marathon is now officially less than 2 months away and it's time to start lengthening my runs significantly.  In the meantime, I'll hang up my SUPER cool medal from Trenton on the awesome medal rack I got from my parents for my birthday yesterday.  That's another thing!  The SWAG from this race was incredible.  Awesome tech half zip pullover instead of just a plain tshirt, race packets were handed out in a reusable drawstring bag with the race logo on it, and the medals.  Oh my the medals.  No seriously, these medals are awesome:

Legit.

Next race on the agenda is the Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot I'm doing.  Just a little 5k.  But I will DEFINITELY be back for more half marathons.  I love that distance.  Long enough to be a challenge, but not so long that you're completely out of commish for days following.  Lucky for me RunDisney puts on 5 half marathons per year, so I have all of those to look forward in the future to in addition to running the marathon in January.  That is, if the marathon doesn't kill me.

Good work, Trenton,

CQ

PS:  I realized the other day that on January 13th I will be EXACTLY 26 years and 2 months old to the day.  And I will be running 26.2 miles.  I didn't even plan that.  How fitting. 

Saaaaaaandy, Cantcha See? I'm in Miseryyyyy

Bonus points to whomever can name the musical my title is derived from.  But seriously, suck it, Hurricane Sandy.  You are such a piece of crap.  You destroyed my favorite shore town. You left me in the dark for a week.  I'm going on five days with no heat, hot water, or use of my stove/oven.  You totaled my friend's car.  Set fire to another friend's apartment building.  Gave me a three hour commute to work.  You killed a bunch of people.  Left a HUGE number of people homeless.  You cancelled the NYC Marathon.  You made Chris Christie use the word "hunker" more than I thought humanly possible.

YOU PUT A BOAT ON MY RUNNING ROUTE.

This past week and a half has been awful, and now I'm looking out my office window at snow.  SNOW.  Will it ever end?  This is getting seriously ridiculous. 

But, as the purpose of this blog is to talk about marathon training, I'm gonna talk about marathon training.  This hurricane has affected my marathon training.  Negatively.  If the boat in the above picture wasn't enough of an indicator, I will now tell you that although I WAS able to get 10 miles in last Saturday, I haven't done any of my weekday short runs in about two weeks.  Speaking of my last long run, I took both the boat picture and this picture along the way: 

I took this picture at around noon on Saturday.  On a beautiful Saturday on the waterfront in Hoboken.  This area is usually overrun with people on a day like that, and there was NO ONE.  THERE.  It was creepy, and this storm successfully derailed my attempt at gaining some normalcy by running, even after it was over.  So in conclusion, and to repeat my first point, Sandy:  YOU CAN GO F YOURSELF.  And as I run the Trenton Half Marathon on Saturday, I shall pretend that the pavement is your dumb whore face, and I'll stomp the crap out of it for 13.1 miles and approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Hate,

CQ