Worst. Race. Ever. I’ll just start it off with that!

This is the tale of my worst race ever. Like, even counting cross country meets back in high school.

I hated this race….but that’s not to say this event wasn’t great. Actually, this event was fantastic. I’ll start with the good…

Back in July, the 4th to be exact, I did a little race called The Half on the 4th in Colorado Springs. It was the day after the last day of school for me, and that’s how I wanted to celebrate, by running a half marathon (I’m weird, I know).

The boy ran with me, so I drove down to Colorado Springs late the night before after my last class of personal training school and a celebratory beer (just one) with my classmates.

We woke up bright and early and made our way down to the race start. Yet another race I’ve done with little sleep (for those of you newbies to the Racing the States World, I do that a lot; usually I do quite well after little sleep. This time: not so much).

It was the first year they were doing this race and a little more than 300 people showed up to participate.

It was an out and back course, pretty flat, starting in Monument Valley Park and running along the Greenway Trail. The path followed a creek and wound through the shade of the trees. It was very lovely.

Now the bad: the first half of the race actually went well. I felt alright and was keeping a good pace. Distracted by checking out my boyfriend’s fantastic calf muscles talking to my boyfriend while running, we made it to the half way point before I started complaining.

I walked through the aid station at the turn around and didn’t want to start running again. I hurt. I hurt bad. My hips were tight, my knees were aching and my heel was hilling me. I was in bad shape. For the remaining part of the course, I really had to push myself.

I felt really bad for the boy. I told him that he could run ahead and finish with a good time; I promised I wouldn’t get mad. But he didn’t, he chose to stay with me and push me into the finish. If only he could have LITERALLY pushed me. (I later told him that he did his due diligence and finished one race with me. From that point on, any more races we run together, he can run at his own pace and finish faster. And I swear I mean it!!)

He was very sweet and keep encouraging me even though I was fighting the pain and the tears back. I don’t have much more to note on the race, really, we kept at it until the end. After all, it was an out and back course, we had to go that way anyway to get to the car.

Once I could see the finish line, I told myself it was just a few minutes of pain and then I would be done.

I’m not going to tell you my time, it’s pretty awful, but I will tell you it is the slowest I have ever run, including my very, VERY first half marathon on a very hilly course. Bleh.

If anything good came out of this race is was that we found a good trail to do training runs on.

And my medal. It may not have been a good race, but I still earned that medal!

We followed the race by inhaling a Qdoba burrito, napping then making our way to Memorial Park to watch some fireworks. It was a very good 4th of July if I do say so myself!

Additional Information:

Half on the 4th Website

A YouTube Video of the Race….go to 0:37, you’ll find a happy runner named Whitney proudly wearing her Vermont City Marathon Shirt (I’m smiling, which must mean it’s close to the beginning!):