Chicago Half Marathon

Chicago Rock n Roll Half Marathon. I got a bad case of Poison Ivy during Tuesday's run, and so I had bandaged up my leg to keep it covered for the run. It didn't seem to bother me while running, my goal was to get under 2 hours, and the 'plan' was to run a 10 minute mile, 2 9:30 miles, and then 9:00 pace the rest of the way. Run started off well, but when it came time to run the 9:00 minute miles, I just didn't quite have it in me, running more around 9:15. At times I felt like I could go a bit faster, but the course was pretty crowded, so it made it nearly impossible to pass people without a lot of extra work. While downtown, the garmin acted up a bit with the buildings, and then we ran through a few tunnels too, so I had to hit lap a few times to get back on the course mile markers. Splits were 10:03, 9:33, 9:26, 8:59, 8:55, 9:38, 9:12, 9:00, 9:24, 9:31, 9:28, 9:31, 9:27 and 1:00 for the last .13 miles coming down to the finish. Overall the garmin had 13.41 miles, but .15 of the extra distance happened in the first 3 miles while running in the tall buildings, so it was fairly accurate after that. AHR was 164, so wasn't pushing it too hard, though it started creeping up at the end. Official time of 2:03:06, pace of 9:24, 5K split of 29:49, 6 miles split of 56:41 and 10 mile split of 1:33:52, so the final 5K was 29:46. Course was nice, temperature was fantastic for August, starting temp was mid 60s, finishing temp was in the 70s, not a cloud in the sky. Thumbs up for the race.