Shanghai Half Marathon

Today I ran in the Shanghai Half Marathon. I now can say that I have ran one in China (I will also be running another one in May on the Great Wall... yes, I do know how awesome that sounds). Anyways, moving on. For the first time I decided to run a 1/2 marathon with plenty of time to train. Considering there isn't soccer for me to play a few times a week or beach volleyball, I have been running quite a bit since I got here. I usually run between 3-6 days per week for about 45-90 min. I assumed that this would help me to be ready to get my best time EVER. Anyways, the past three weeks I have been fighting a cold and it has been raining, so my running got cut a lot. I think in the past two weeks I ran like 3 or four times not to mention, the week or two before I didn't run too much and when I did I felt like crap, but such is life. Long story short, my "training" didn't go as planned.

Friday night I picked up my race packet. It is the best race packet I have ever gotten. Not only is the shirt the cool running material, but we got a Mizuno backpack type thing. In the bag there were also lots of booklets and pamphlets, most of which were in Chinese, our numbers for our shirts, and our timing chip for our shoe. This morning the bus came at 5:30 am to pick us up, yes it was ridiculously early considering the race started to 7:30. I decided to plan ahead and started to get everything ready last night. Soccer taught me that it is always smarter to prepare the night before because otherwise things get left behind. As I was packing my bag with my wallet, banana, watch, Ipod, etc. I remembered that I needed to get my number. I went to the table only to remember that I threw away the race booklets and most likely my number and my chip. CRAP! no number, no race. Just my luck too, earlier yesterday I decided to take out our trash, something that happens about once a week. Considering it was 10:30 pm when I discovered this I decided to not go dumpster diving, but luckily my roommate decided to not run, so I was able to run under the name of "Janai Wallace" (oh and this also means that I would be out of my deposit for the chip).

So this morning I woke up super early ready to go. It was awesome, the start was on Nanjing Lu (one of the big tourist roads) over looking the river and the Pearl Tower. It was not raining, and the temperature was great. This was setting up to be one of my best runs ever. Well, until I started. The full 13.1 miles I never felt like I hit the runner's high and my legs felt heavy the entire time. The good news I finished, but with my second to worse time of 1 hr 59 min and 40 sec. The good news being that anyone under 2 hours got free ghetto shoes, bad news being I was bummed about my time. Oh well, you win some and you lose some. BUT, I can now say that I have ran a half marathon in China, pretty cool! Oh, and about the shoes, luck with have it they didn't have any my size, oh and my time won't show up under my name since I threw my chip away, but I do have a shirt and a bag to prove it (and a couple pictures).