I finished. That is the kindest thing that can be said about my actual run in the 2009 Napa to Sonoma Wine Country Half Marathon. My goal was to finish the race in under three hours — in reality, my official time was 3:34:34.7.1 Don’t get me wrong ... it was a great weekend, a great experience and I feel fortunate to have been a part of it. Let me tell you why.
Final Weeks of Training
On July 5, I ran my longest training run of the year — 10.1 miles. Based on the 2 hours and 12 minutes it took to complete just over 10 miles, I was easily on course to finish the 13.1 mile half marathon in under 3 hours. I felt far better physically and was running significantly faster than during my training for San Antonio (my only other half marathon). So I set out for Napa and Sonoma psyched that I could run a great half marathon and finish with a “real” runner’s time.2
The Napa Difference
As it turned out, the Napa to Sonoma course had many more hills than I (and numerous others) expected.3 Combine that terrain with temperatures that rose rapidly through the 80s after the starting gun and I quickly found myself fighting an unexpectedly tough battle.
Mile by Mile
I started off at a solid clip, managing to run most of the way up the initial (and steepest) hill on the course. For the first two miles, I kept pace with teammate Renee and the rest of the pack of runners around me. The peaceful scenery of the surrounding vineyards made for perfect surroundings. At the two mile mark teammate Karen passed us, at which point I took a short walk break and fell a couple of minutes behind Renee. Read the rest of this entry »
- This was roughly six minutes longer than it took me to complete the San Antonio half marathon last November. An even bigger groan came from the fact I finished last out of my entire age group! (And no, I won’t tell you what age group that is.) [↩]
- Plus maybe drink some good wine along the way. [↩]
- Our team’s coach, Rick Ellison, wrote afterward that based on his perspective as an experienced racer, “the course was considerably more difficult than most.” [↩]
That tongue-in-cheek speech has always resonated with me because of the kernel of truth in it. To a large degree, America was founded and initially populated by people who didn’t fit in anywhere else. The Pilgrims and their spiritual brethren came here because they wanted to worship and express beliefs in religions that were outside the mainstream (and frequently outside the law in their native European countries). Others with strong streaks of individualism came here seeking riches or adventure — things that were increasingly tough to find in the more developed and more tightly governed nations they left behind. These were the individuals who would develop into everything from cowboys to industrialists. 
