This weekend was a lesson in patience and composure, the former lacking in today's race (half-marathon) but the latter, plentiful this weekend. More of a hard effort training day than a race, I ran the race unrested having done my first three hour ride yesterday and 5 x 1 mile repeats on Thursday morning. Starting yesterday's ride, I felt the shakes and a bonk within the first hour, unbelievable. I knew I started the ride somewhat depleted as I had skipped lunch the day prior and was probably short 1000 or so calories. Also, I am teaching my body to train and race on less fuel this year, allowing myself only one ClifBar, one gel, and one salt tablet for the entire ride. Keeping my composure, I ate my ClifBar and took the salt tablet 30 minutes later and waited. I had a bad patch for about 30 minutes but knew the nutrition would kick in and sure enough, it did. I ended up doing a 4 km climb only 1.5 minutes slower than my best time. Let's get back to the race. Every year, I use this race to gauge my early season fitness. I planned to go out at 6:30 miles and descend down to 6 minute miles for a goal pace of 6:15 and a time between 1:21-1:23. My first mile was a 5:47, oops. I definitely got caught up with the field and found myself racing, unrealistically with some big wigs. I tried to slow down and I was fairly successful but my ego kept causing me to speed up. At mile 9, I felt my right calf twitch and I knew I was cramping. I composed myself and went into crisis management. My longest run this season is 10 miles and the lack of mileage caught up to me today. I decided to slow my pace in hopes of not having to resort to walking. Both calves cramped on and off from miles 10 until the finish and though I hobbled, I never walked. I was on pace to go a 1:21 but the cramping resulted in a 1:23:42 finish time. I ran 21 seconds slower than last year, a bit disappointing because I felt more fit this year. Though I still need to work on patience, I think I have composure down. I'm holding the number one in the picture to represent one race down.