austin | Running Without Music

Austin Marathon Pre-Race Thoughts

No doubt Austin is one of my favorite cities in the U.S, but I may be biased because the only time I’ve been was for SXSW (South by Southwest), a big interactive/film/music conference. I’m super excited though, going mainly to enjoy the food, bars, and people – running 26.2 miles only to burn it all off.

This race will mark state #8, and marathon #13. This isn’t my first rodeo, so not really nervous here. I don’t plan on PRing it, because I’m still expected to do the IronTEAM workouts when I get back. Luckily it will be a “recovery” week for the IronTEAM and syncs up well with this event. There’s a HUGE difference when I try to hit 4:30 vs 5:00. Would I rather be sore and hurt the next few days or not? 5:00+ it is! My “taper” weekend consisted with some tough hills, which I shouldn’t have done – oops.

Somewhat unprepared for this race, from a strategy perspective. I finally saw the race course map this morning, came across this helpful guide from Team Spiridon, and only a few hours ago, I mapped out where I need to be and when all weekend. I still need to pack! What a mess!

Austin SXSW Half Marathon

I’m was in Austin, TX for a few days for SXSW Interactive, so I missed some IronTEAM practices and workouts. My schedule has been pretty hectic lately that it was tough to schedule in some sort of workout. The schedule for SXSW is rough, as the panels and discussions start at 8am, and continue on at night for networking events and parties til 2am. Most of the panels were worthwhile except one morning, so I took the opportunity to run a little bit.

My initial intention was to just run a loop around the river, which was about 6 miles, but I just felt so good that I kept running for another loop and then some and ended up being a half marathon. Unfortunately I did not have my Garmin GPS watch, so I downloaded the RunKeeper GPS app on my iPhone. The GPS was sporadic so it wasn’t very accurate, but according to the GMaps Pedometer online, I indeed ran about 13.1 miles.

The course was fairly flat, scenery was calm, not too many runners since it was a Monday, and it was rather gloomy. There were sponsored water stops which helped me a lot because I pushed myself to skip any walk breaks, and stepped up my pace a bit too. I was on a slight time crunch because time was ticking as SXSW was still going on and I didn’t want to miss anymore events. It was a really good detox from all the Austin partying the previous nights before, so I was very refreshed for another round!