AJ's Not so Everyday Blog

First off, if you have never been to St. Anthony's, GO! It has to be one of the most fun short course races out there. It's in a nice area with other things to do outside the race venue and the race is very well organized and done very professionally. Unfortunately leading up to the race my dad passed away and I caught the flu shortly after so I missed about three weeks of training which mentally and physical sucked. I was going to bail on the race but decided I needed to get back in the swing of things and it would be a good baseline on where I needed to work on some things heading into the three race Jax series. The weather for the weekend was near perfect, and made for a real enjoyable weekend. I was able to bring my buddy Dana and brother-in-law Marty down as Sherpa's for the weekend, we got down Saturday afternoon and got my bike checked in and swam about half of the Olympic course. Race morning was very chill and since I was the 19th swim wave I didn't really ...

Just sounded like a fun race, so we signed up to check it out. The weather was looking pretty bad as we were heading to the race and only got worse as we waited for it to start. I was already feeling a little under the weather but since we already paid for it I made sure we were going to run to earn our finisher wine glass. The bottom dropped out about .25 mile into the race and never let up. Ended up just being a miserable race and I just wanted to finished so I could go back home. Time: 22:48 4/34 Age Group 52/1070 Overall

My brother-in-law and his wife said they were signing up for this race so it was a no-brainer to tag along and have some fun. I'm much more of a morning workout type of person so this race being held at 4:30pm felt a little strange. I personally didn't really change much of my schedule leading up to the race since it was suppose to be more fun than anything. So I started my day with my scheduled 4 hour ride, ate a ton of food and took a nap, then got ready to head down to the race. It took us forever to get through St. Augustine, so much we almost missed packet pick up and pretty much eliminated any chance of a longer pre-race warm up. We were able to get a quick half mile jog in before we had to line up. The gun went off and I ran the first half mile pretty hard until the front was thinned out some and I wasn't tripping over everyone. I probably burned up a few too matches many running that hard at the start, oh well. I actually didn't feel to horrible during the run...

I did this race a couple years ago and had an awesome time and it was also my first half marathon so I figured I'd go back and see if I could improve my time while getting a little jump on triathlon season since it won't start for a couple more months. I was pretty excited heading into the race since I have been running a good bit all winter with weekly mileage ranging from 21-42 miles with a few 14-15 mile days in there. We drove down early Sunday morning, so I did my normal pre-race nutrition and headed down to the race. I got a my packet and did a nice and easy 20 minute warm up run in and headed to the start of the race, I ran a a 1:41:16 in training a month earlier so the plan was to break 1:40. They had a 1:40 pacer so I figured it would help with my pacing to run with him. The gun went off and we had a small group of five in our group and started clicking off miles. The first 5 miles went by really fast and I was feeling great, our pacer was a little hit and miss wit...