Race Report: Timmins Golden Trails Half Marathon:

Time: 1:32:28
Place: 10th overall, 2nd AG
Weather: rainy, wet course, cool

I have a love/hate with this race. It's half road race and half trail race. Today it REALLY was a Trail race. I avoid trail races for two reasons: they have hills, turns, boulders and rutted paths that make it impossible for me to sustain a good running rhythm. Today, after a night of incessant rain, there were a lot of slick spots, muddy paths and deep puddles in addition to the shortcomings listed above.

The first half of the race is a series of ascents and descents that are OK because the surface is paved. At KM 10, however, it turns to gravel and gets increasingly serpentine in nature. Also there are some up/down dunes that are near spills waiting to happen and bad for the old joints. The last 5K starts out benign enough; it's exits the trails and hits some nice, long straight streets. But at the 18K mark, we hit a small trail that is really a busy road shoulder. Then there is a full-strength uphill that last year had me on the brink of walking. It is short--maybe 50 meters--but takes a minute or so to recover from...it must be a 10% grade, and it's close to the finish so the lactate is chomping' on most of us with zeal.

A piece of bad news was that someone figured out that the course was a little short lat year, maybe 500 meters. I figured they kept it that way for humanitarian reasons; it IS, after all a slow course anyway. But this year, we had to circumvent the easy, shorter way of finishing the non-track portion (you do a lap on the track at the start/finish)and run a longer route. It probably added 90-120 seconds to the times.

How I ran...I felt crappy at the onset. Sluggish and in fear of the late trail. So I was ultra conservative:
miles 1-5: 35:20. Very slow for me, especially for the fastest part of the course.
miles 6-10: 34:00. I passed a lot of people on this rugged trail portion.
miles 11-13.1: 23:08. This was actually pretty good. It was a mudbath in places and I moved up more on the field.

It's the longest race where I've won AG hardware, so I'm proud of that. Since last year I ran 1:35 on the shorter course, I'd say I'm well ahead of that point training wise. But rain makes the post-race festivities a dud. So...I'll await my hardware in the mail.