TBA
Surf City Half Marathon
Running the Surf City Half Marathon with the Lee family is always fun, even if AJ is now capable of smoking all the adults even when he's having an off day, and both Mike and I seem to keep getting slower and slower. Mike is still running pretty strong, with an 8:14/mile pace at mile 3 that I decided I couldn't keep up with... but still can't complain with my 1:55:21 chip time (8:48/mile)/1:54:44 GPS time (8:41/mile), which was a solid improvement over the Long Beach Half Marathon a few months ago.
The race out on PCH was pretty good, as mentioned the little neighborhood with hills for miles 3-5 or so was solid but definitely more work, then the turnaround just after mile 8 was where the gentle tailwind turned into a not-so-gentle feeling headwind. Can't have been that bad though as pace only got worse by about 15 seconds per mile, and thankfully we beat the rain. Although shuttle bus lines were awful, I ended up calling a rideshare to get back and forth from the City Hall-area parking disaster.
Mike chose Pho Love 3 for lunch, and while it had ordinary ratings, the pho was definitely legit. Beef bone pho in particular was worth the mess for the pictures, the kara age was more about quantity than quality. Also, in the same parking lot... finally saw someone mounting a Starlink dish to their car. Finally, the Beach Cities Challenge medal this year was actually the coolest it'd been in a while (a dolphin!).