Las Vegas 1/2 Marathon

Wow! I did not expect that a race could touch me that much as my first half marathon did...
Crossing the finish line was quite exciting! But let's start at the beginning:

The start of the race was at 6:07am. Horrible!!! I usually run in the evenings and do not do well in the mornings...and 6am is not even a morning, it's the middle of the night, since it meant I would have to get up at 4:15. Now that is not that unusual, taking into account that I've done that on plenty of climbing trips. But still, this was something different!
Surprisingly enough, getting up was not that hard at all...The anticipation of my first race in over ten years definitely helped :-)
After having a banana and a coffee we headed to the lobby to find our way to the starting line, which we did not scout before...not that it would have been a problem, following about 2000 other runners...It was quite interesting to see the mixture of people in the hotels at 5am. On the one hand the runners anxious to get to the race, on the other hand the Vegas party/gambling folks heading back to their rooms. The vibes form the runners were incredible though...Everyone was psyched, looking forward to a fun event.

We made it to the starting line at about 5:45, just in time for the start of the women's elite group...We had to hover around for another 20 minutes before we were sent of as well...

Then the race itself: My plan was to start out easy, since my legs were not that happy with me on my last training run, when I started out pretty hard, and of course I had never run more than 10k...Well, starting easy was no problem at all, since it was so crowded, that it was pretty hard to go fast :-)
At mile two the field had spread out enough that I could find my own rhythm without having to think about other runners too much.
The best part of the race was definitely between miles 5 and 8, were I had a hard time getting the smile off my face. Everything was perfect...The tunes the shuffle function of my ipod threw at me, the sunrise, the run, the people cheering from the sidewalk...everything was flowing!
Then I ran past a mile marker, and a few minutes later I had forgotten if it was mile 9 or 10...
That was a little weird...of course it was mile 9...Anyway, I still felt well...until mile 12. Up to now I had the feeling that I was passing more people than people were passing me...but at mile 12 it hit me...I felt as if I was going backwards...My left calf and my right hamstring were tightening up, I was getting hot, and I just wanted it to be over...and soon enough it was over...
crossing the finish line I got the chills! An amazing feeling... To top it off, I had achieved my original goal of going below 2 hours, despite not having run too much in the last weeks...

Walking out of the finishing zone towards the hotel runners were handed all kinds of foods, which I happily munched on...really good!

Can't wait for the next race! Probably another 1/2 in SF in February...