Boy did I have a nice time running the Boston Half.

Kevin and I ran the Boston Half back in 2022 because he’s always looking for a reason to come back to Boston anyway, and also because it would be a good race to run together.

We weren’t counting on doing that again this year but after I signed up for the Distance Medley I would give him the obligatory, “Hey, you should sign up for the 5K and come to Boston,” or, “Hey, you should sign up for the 10K and come to Boston,” because that's the kind of thing we do with each other.

Those lures didn’t really get a bite.

Then, over the summer, or whenever the half marathon registration opened up, I said, “Hey, you should sign up for the half marathon and come to Boston,” Kevin replied, “Hm…I might.” Something along those lines.

I couldn’t believe it worked.

He was unsure he was going to do the race up until a couple of weeks before - remember, we both ran Chicago a few weeks before the half marathon.

Anyway, he made the trip, and we ran the race together.

I am not great at running a race with someone else. (I do love training runs with someone else. This is something I have learned over the past 5 years - running with other people is very nice.)

I get in my own head enough I don’t need to mess around with someone else’s. My big fear is I’m going to mess up their plan, or I’m going to do something differently in my own approach because I’m worrying too much about running with someone else at someone else’s pace.

But that’s the nice thing about this half marathon - both times neither of us had any agenda going in. So we ran together and that was the first thing about this half marathon - we had a good time hanging out the entire time.

The way Kevin said it was that we made a pretty good team because he kept us going at a pretty good pace early, and I helped pace him late.

Which I guess is true - but I didn’t realize it at the time. I’m just used to going out too fast all the time so I just thought we were going out too fast.

The Boston Half course is somewhat challenging - there are a lot of hills. But there are just as many downhills as uphills, so our splits were consistently inconsistent - 10:00/mi one mile, 11:00/mi the next. (We basically averaged 10:30/mi, so I guess it was spot-on.)

I was fully expecting we’d finish somewhere in the range of 2 hours, 30 minutes.

And we were kind of zipping along (for us) at certain points. I would try to reset and slow down but even when I thought I slowed down we were running faster than 11:00/mi, and it felt comfortable. So we ended up at just under 2 hours, 21 minutes - about 4 minutes better than 3 years ago.

That time I was not in the best shape for the half - there’s a big uphill at miles 11 and 12 and I was done by the time we hit it. I definitely slowed Kevin down that time.

But if Kevin’s telling the truth about the pace at the end, maybe I sped him up this time and made up for that - because I felt really strong at the end of this race. I guess that marathon training really stuck in there.

It didn’t feel that way at the start - it was a bit warmer than expected, and by mile 3 I thought I was going to be in trouble. I was wearing shorts and a long sleeve tee, and I considered ditching the long sleeves…but then the cloud cover came in and it was a nice cool breeze every so often and we both felt a lot better.

The course is fun because as you go out for the sixth mile and before you turn back to the park where the race begins and ends, you approach the street on which Kevin and I lived back in 1999-2000. That turnaround point is a nice little piece of nostalgia, running as former roommates, even though the course is exclusively through neighborhoods where we spent zero time back then.

The course was different than 2022. (Kevin overheard someone talking during the race about how the course has changed every year.) A lot of it was actually the same, but parts of it we didn’t remember. The ending, though, turned around before the Franklin Park Zoo, which we went through a few years ago, and then finished in the same spot as the start line, which was different than back then too - in 2022 it ended around a track that may or may not exist anymore. (There was a lot of construction in that area.)

Everything about the race was great - I had a great Distance Medley experience. (Look at those medals!) The weather was much nicer than advertised, both for waiting for the race to start, during the race (minus about 3 miles), and as we took pictures and such after the run.

We even took a gamble on parking rather than shuttle busing and that worked out perfectly too. (And we grabbed lunch at a spot where we could watch the Jets and they even won! What a weekend.)

Personally, I was once again reminded that I like the half marathon distance a lot. I think I have a couple of more marathons in me, but I know I have a lot of half marathons to go. I am pretty confident if I trained solely for a half that I can break 2 hours. That’s a goal for another year…and I think circumstances have to be right. (Read: It would not happen on the Boston Half course.)

But for Sunday, November 9 at the Boston Half, 2:20:52 was just perfect.