Last Sunday I completed by 19th half marathon.  It was the 21st running of the Surf City Marathon/Half Marathon in Huntington Beach, CA.  I grew up about 20 minutes from HB and so this was kind of a homecoming race.

I had originally signed up for the full marathon last year.  Currently my overall long-term running plans are to complete a full marathon every other year (to hopefully give my body time to recover and just  not tax myself too much given my history of injuries).  I had been contemplating between Surf City and the Carlsbad Marathon.  Eventually I settled on Surf City and my good friend KP was thinking of doing it as well (though in the end she couldn’t due to scheduling conflicts).  I was excited about the race and the course didn’t seem too bad.  One gripe I read about the full distance was that there was a lot of “looping” back and forth along PCH and the ocean.  So it could be a little disheartening because you see the people that are a few miles ahead of you and realize you still have a ways to go.

The Big Sur Marathon lottery came a few months after I signed up for Surf City.  I thought “why not sign up for the first timer/bucket list lottery and see what happens?”  Sure enough, I received the email that I made it in and could register for 2017.  So I did.  Now I had a decision to make.  Surf City was on February 5 and Big Sur is on April 30.  With such a short time between races I knew that I shouldn’t try to do 2 full marathons in such a short time (see above about me being injury prone).  I made the decision to drop to the half marathon for Surf City.

The race expo was set up in a large tent on one of the parking lots along the beach southeast of the pier.  The organization for the bib and t-shirt pickup was well done.  You had to know your bib number ahead of time because within the front of the tent, they had lines with a certain interval of number (1-1000, 1001-2000, etc).  And then they had a separate area with lines based on your shirt size.  So I was able to pickup my bib and shirt and tote bag within just a few minutes of arriving.  This was good because I only had a few minutes to check out the expo as we were heading to meet friends for lunch. Continue reading “2017 Surf City Half Marathon race recap” →