Training for a race ideally involves lots of running, including runs that at least approach the distance you intend to cover.  For the New York City Half Marathon, I did not do those things.

Since November I have been dealing with a hip injury.  Fortunately last month I went to the doctor and got into physical therapy, which has done wonders, mainly making it possible for me to run more than three miles at a time without pain.

But with the combination of rest and hour-long therapy sessions twice a week, I wasn’t exactly running for the past two months.  I did one run longer than four miles and that was in mid-January.  The last month before the race featured a total of 20 miles.

I told my physical therapist I expected to walk a lot of the race, but she said I would probably be surprised at how much I would be able to run.  That turned to be very true.

My plan was to take three walk breaks with three or four miles of running in between.  The first break was scheduled for mile 4 at the top of Central Park, which had the only big hill on the entire course.  The four mile mark, hills and slanted roadways were the factors that had brought on the most pain in my hip, so that seemed like the logical place to take it easy.  But when I got there, my thought was that I had to test it sometime, and what better way than a mile that had all the potential triggers?

I had some discomfort, but I made it through without the sharp pain that had become so familiar.  After that, we cruised out of the park and down 7th Avenue where hundreds of screaming people lined both sides of the course all the way through Times Square.  I’ll put that down as one of the coolest race experiences I’ve had along with going across the Golden Gate Bridge during a race in San Francisco.

Halfway through mile 8 was when I started to think I had a real chance to run the whole thing without any breaks.  My hip felt pretty good and I was making decent time for having so little training.  I had anticipated a finish time of about 2:30 with the walking.  My only walk breaks turned out to be a few seconds at water stops and I finished juuuuust over two hours:

9:17, 8:57, 9:24, 9:18, 9:18, 9:26, 8:51, 9:32, 9:21, 9:20, 8:22, 9:48, 8:36, :40 = 2:00:16

Far from my best times, but given how much sweat and effort I’ve put in to get back to running at all, I’m prouder of this race than many I have done.  My next one won’t be until the fall, so I’m looking forward to a spring of enjoying being back out there with easy miles to really build up a good foundation again.