Race Report: The 2025 Flying Pig Half-Marathon 🏃‍♂️

Final chip time: 2:07:37 (9:44/mile)

After a disappointing finish in the 2024 Flying Pig Half-Marathon, this year’s result felt much better: a 27 minute improvement. The cooler weather helped, but this was mostly the product of consistent training in the spring. These are beginner gains, and I will never again have such a marked year-over-year improvement in my running, so I’m enjoying the achievement. It was a good race.

Training

In late January I began training with the Runna app. Runna’s training plans are built from typical weekly schedules: a day of tempo, a day of speed, a long run, and at least one easy run. There’s not much new there. But Runna, as a digital tool, really works for me. Each Sunday I look at the week ahead and ensure that the training schedule aligns with my work & family responsibilities. I then open Runna each morning and follow the prescribed run and its guided prompts (which sync to my Apple Watch Ultra and post to my preferred web services). A human coach would be better, and I’ll someday move in that direction, but right now Runna is good enough to help me realize beginner gains. This is visible, for example, in the mileage: I ran 291 miles in preparation for the race—100 more miles than last year. These included plenty of treadmill runs in snowy January & February, and too many 4:45am runs during the work week. But I reached the point in March where I missed running during the de-load weeks, and that felt like a good sign.

Runna gave me a fair number of long runs in April, including a 12 mile run that I extended to 13.1 when I realized I was on pace for a PR (and finished that training run in 2:15:00). Unlike last year, where I did the 8+ mile runs in my neighborhood, this year I drove to local trails and made a morning of it. I enjoyed the training as much as the race day, and that seems like the only way to make this hobby sustainable.

On the night before the race, I logged into the Garmin Connect website and made a pace plan that accounted for elevation and a negative split. I paced it at a 2:06:00 finish time (Runna predicted my finish between 2:00:00 and 2:06:00) and loaded it into my Apple Watch Ultra, with pace alerts that would warn me when my current pace was +/- 20 seconds. I hydrated, tracked my meals with MacroFactor, and felt ready.

Race Day

Race day was 50 degrees and lightly raining. Lack of sunshine aside, it was perfect running weather. I wore a hydration vest filled with Tailwind, and I felt sufficiently fueled and hydrated throughout the race. My splits (shown here year-over-year) tell the story:

Miles one, two, and three aren’t slow, but they’re slower than planned. I suspected this would be a problem when I entered my starting corral. I registered for the race a year ago, and I then chose the corral for runners with an anticipated finish between 2:30:00 and 2:15:00. When we crossed the starting line, I needed to move faster than everyone around me. I spent many miles weaving through other runners, which is not a strategy for race day success. This is most apparent in my times for miles six and seven, which are two of the larger uphill climbs. The crowd around me slowed down and grew more dense; I had no choice but to fall into rhythm with everyone else. I’m sure I saved some energy, but I am also sure that my finish time took a hit. Mile eleven, in contrast, was an excellent downhill run; I stepped on the gas and loved every minute of it. I lost focus during mile twelve, which was well off my planned pace, and I should have pushed harder to sprint to the finish. (Notice the .3, rather than a .1, which I suspect is my watch accounting for the distance I picked up by weaving through other runners earlier in the race.) But Bayside’s excellent cover of “Aside” by the Weakerthans played on my headphones as I crossed the finish line, and it was a perfect moment.

Anyway, no regrets here. I met my goals, I enjoyed the race, and I felt great the next day. I also thought, as Peter Sagal writes in The Incomplete Book of Running, “Maybe I could do that faster…”

Lessons Learned

I’ve chosen a faster starting corral for my next race, and I’m excited to run alongside folks who will challenge me. But I have no genetic gifts for running, I’m still inexperienced, and I’m moving deeper into (or past?!) middle age. It won’t be long before it’s physiological impossible for me to achieve year-over-year improvements in my race time. That’s ok. I think I’m becoming a better runner, and I’ll take better over faster every time.