Race #206
Half Marathon #74
2023 Race #3
2023 Half Marathon #1
Cane Bay Half Marathon #1

I registered us for this race after watching the Greenville Half but not getting to run it. If it had not been for that little bit of fomo, we never would have discovered this gem of a race.

We headed down on Friday, a little later than planned. A rewards night on hotels.com meant that we reserved a slightly nicer hotel. Too bad we didn’t get to enjoy the room all that long.

On race morning, we had about 20 minutes more to drive to the race start located at a local YMCA. I chose the closest hotel I could; this YMCA seemed to be tucked into a cluster of higher middle class homes. We had just enough time pick up our bib and gear, pin on our bibs, and wait just a few minutes before the race started.

Since we made our way towards the start after a lot of other people, we found ourselves further back than I would have preferred. This didn’t bother me too much though because I knew everyone would settle into their race pace pretty soon.

Right at 7 am the half marathoners and 10k runners took off. (I wish the next race we ran had also started at 7 rather than 8 because it gets warm quickly in the south.) Soon after we started running, I turned on the music and settled into the long run, looking forward to the lack of hills.

Initially I tossed around the idea of walking every 3 miles. As we got into the run, I realized that I didn’t want to do that and instead wanted to put in the work and try to run the whole thing without breaks, like the 10 miler we ran a few weeks before. Spoiler alert: we did it!

Much of the individual miles blended together, in a good way. The terrain held almost no elevation change as we ran past pleasant scenery. Physically, I felt great, entirely capable of this pace. As I wrap up this recap, yes wrap up, I will mention a few things that remain in my memory about the race although not associated with a particular mile due to my schedule preventing me from writing this recap sooner.

Because we started further back, I had a goal, in the back of my mind, that I wanted to chase down the 2 hour pacer so I kept looking ahead to see how close we were getting. Unfortunately, the only time I saw the pacer was at the one turn around portion that came fairly early on in the race. Since I, and Mom, never saw the pacer after that, I wondered if that particular pacer was one that we saw walking and passed a couple miles from the end.

By the time we got to the final mile, a quick glance at my watch (something I had done only twice before in the whole race) and made some really rough mental calculations which had me thinking that a sub 2 hour run, an easy one at that, was possible if we picked up the pace just a little bit.

Unfortunately, we had just a little bit too much territory to cover and finished just over that mark. (See splits below.) I still feel good about this run, really good. Oh! Mom won her age group too!