Two-Twenty-Two Duathlon Race Report

Knowledge is power, so knowing who you’re racing against is generally a good thing. Knowing that your closest competition is likely to come from someone whose 10k PR is 3 minutes slower than yours? That leads to a lot of confidence.

The thing that I love most about races run by Set Up Events, other than the great organization, timing, and police support, is that they post the entire list of entrants for a race on the race page and keep it updated as more people enter. This is more than likely so that people can check that they are entered, but it also serves the purpose of letting athletes see who they’re up against.

On Thursday, I looked through the list of entries and searched for past results for everyone. Some had raced more than others, and some obviously had more pertinent results to the event at hand, but for every competitor I managed to find some information about a previous race. Given that there were only 44 people on race day, and even fewer pre-registered, checking everyone’s past results wasn’t a particularly lengthy task, but it certainly made me that much more confidant at the start.

The Two-Twenty-Two Duathlon was organized fairly late with registration only opening a few weeks ago, hence the small turnout, but it served as a good opportunity to get a race effort in on the bike before Powerman Alabama next month. In that sense, the extreme bike-bias in this race was very much a good thing. The race started with a 2-lap 2 mile run, followed by a 21 mile bike, and finished with another 2-lap 2 mile run. The run legs were actually about 2.08 miles by my Garmin, and confirmed as closer to 2.1 miles by the race director.

Myrtle Beach Half-Marathon Race Report

Yesturday was the Myrtle Beach Marathon & Half-Marathon and I made the trek out there from Clemson for the weekend. Originally my plan was for this to be my third and last half-marathon in my build up to the Boston Marathon in April, but I found out about a much more local race 3 weeks from now that I’m fairly certain I’ll do in an effort to drop my PR even further as it’s a net downhill course but this weekend’s time may prove difficult to beat.

So my last two races, Charleston on 1/14 and Miami on 1/29 resulted in a new PR in a great race followed by an awful race. Since Miami, though, I haven’t really had a single bad workout. By last Saturday I had built up to equal my longest training run, but cruised through it and felt great, and then I smoked a nice 12 mile threshold workout on Tuesday.

As a result, I was pretty confident heading into this race and once again I didn’t have too many goals because I wanted to just use it as a good marathon training run. I arrived to Myrtle Beach on Friday evening with a large group of Clemson FCA runners and friends, many of whom I met for the first time. Friday evening we had a group prayer and asked God to protect those of us running and to help carry us through the race. I had never done anything like that before, but I felt somewhat obligated to participate as these were some extremely kind people letting me stay with them.

Miami Half-Marathon Race Report

It’s been almost a week and a half since the Miami Half-Marathon, but if I had raced well, this would have probably been done last week, and in considerable detail. Sometimes you get to a race, and it’s just not your day. In Miami I was more nervous than I can remember being before a race, at least since high school. I could hardly sleep the night before and although I didn’t end up feeling tired during the race, I’m sure 2 hours of sleep didn’t help my case.


In a way, I had completely screwed myself over by running as fast as I did in Charleston two weeks prior. Am I really in 1:20 half-marathon shape? I happened to have a stellar race in Charleston, but if I had run 1:22 or even just under my former PR of 1:22:33, then I certainly wouldn’t have gone out as fast as I did here.


The weather was warm (70 degrees apparently) and humid (90%), but the humidity didn’t hit me until we were off and running. The start was complete chaos, and I ended up having to jump the fence to get into the seeded corral where I was supposed to be. On top of that, they then squeezed some “Race of the Americas” runners in with us… well, in front of us really which is rather an insult as our corral had to have run proven times to be there (i.e. my 28th overall 2:51:03 in the full a year ago). Finally, the organizers decided to let the elite athletes go 10 seconds before the rest of us, and had volunteers stopping us from running for that time.