Race Report: Dances with Dirt Half Marathon @ Devil's Lake State Park - Baraboo, WI
Time: 2:14:58
76th place (10th AG)

This was my longest distance ever raced on a trail, and it was a doozy. Lots of elevation, technical single-track trails and a hot day on top of it. I wasn't planning on going all-out on this, for a variety of reasons related to recent training and injuries, but I did want to post a respectable effort. I thought a sub-2:00 would be a decent goal.

Within the first couple miles, I knew sub-2:00 would be out of reach. First of all, I was late for the race because the line for the port-a-potty took forever. No worries, I thought, it's chip-timed anyway and it's fine if I'm late by a minute. Little did I know how valuable that positioning was going to be. A quarter mile into the race, the trail became single track and everybody screeeeeched to a halt and caused a huge bottleneck. It's pretty tough to stand there waiting to run while your Garmin ticks away, but for the first four miles or so it was run, walk, stop, walk, run, walk, stop, run.

Around 5 miles or so, it cleared up for a while and I gained some ground, only to go back to single track a few different times. It was pretty frustrating to be forced to run somebody else's pace for extended periods. My pacing was totally messed up (check those splits out) and I went from periods of run/walk/stop to surging up hills and bombing the downhills to use up my surplus of energy.

At 8 miles, I loosened up and starting running a more even pace as it thinned out around me. I stopped caring so much about my arbitrary time goals and focused on finishing the race feeling strong instead of the last two races that I hit walls during. So that's exactly what I did. The last mile was INSANE. I just sort of let myself go down this technical, rocky downhill towards the finish line and had a blast knowing I was almost done. Last mile fastest. 1:17 first half, 0:58 second half.

My ankles were on fire after the race with all the rolling they did across rocks and roots, but I think the post-race pond shower more than made up for any pain I was in. And then the beer took away the rest of the pain. :-)

I had a blast camping the night before with friends and hanging out after the race, cheering on all the other marathoners and ultra runners. It was an extremely fun event. A huge congrats to my running cohorts, who ran distances ranging from the 10K to the full marathon, but had to endure ridiculous DWD challenges of their own: Amy K., Evan Z., Krista, Rochelle, Annie, Tracey G. and Marty.

Splits (see if you can spot where the bottlenecks occurred): 15:35 - 14:03 - 11:12 - 13:24 - 8:54 - 8:38 - 9:52 - 7:26 - 7:41 - 10:03 - 8:57 - 8:28 - 7:25