I'm still in Palau and haven't forgotten about the blog! Sorry about the silence over the past month, I've gotten a bit caught up in diving, running, basketball-ing, zip lining, playing in treehouses, swimming, and (of course) car repairing. The silver lining is that all my running around has provided excellent blogging material. So let's start with running!
The Palau Half Marathon took place on April 2, 2011, just a week after I returned from visiting Jesse in Hawaii. After almost two weeks where I consumed only macadamia nuts, coconut syrup, and waffles, and my training consisted of boogie boarding and playing about 20 games of foosball a day, I wasn't feeling all that confident in my half marathoning abilities. But...
Yup! Somehow I managed to win for the women. And a picture made it into the Island Times...a picture that was immediately post-race and will never leave Palau if I have anything to say about it. So you'll just have to settle on a few of the photos that I had editorial control over...
(A post-race photo with all the participants. The last 100 yards or so were across the beach at PPR. Hopping into the ocean after finishing the race wasn't half bad!)
(Some of the ladies from the judiciary raced too!)
Overall, the race was a ton of fun. But man, there were some low points! The race started in the state of Aimeliik, which is on the west side of Babeldaob about six miles away from the bridge to Koror.
(Aimeliik is the light green state on the west side of Babeldaob. We started there and ran south over the Japan-Palau Friendship bridge into Koror, then onto Arakabesang, where PPR, the finish line, is located.)
It was scheduled to start at 5:30 in the morning, so participants met in downtown Koror at about 5 am and drove up to Aimeliik. We started on a gravel road about a mile and a half off the main road, in complete darkness. It was pretty funny to see everyone standing around waiting to start the race...or, I guess to not see everyone waiting around to start the race. But we had a few trucks to guide us, and a few runners had lights on their hats or shirts, so we were able to start running without running into each other. The first 1/2 mile or so was a lot of fun...I felt the great surge of adrenaline and excitement that I usually feel at the start of the race.
And then it started raining. And I started kicking myself. Now, the day before, I'd been trying to figure out whether I wanted to wear sunglasses or a hat, and bored various people with my thought process (much like I'm boring you now!). Ultimately I decided on sunglasses only, thinking that the sunglasses were lighter and I could deal with the rain with just sunglasses, so they'd serve me better in the long run. What I didn't think about was that it would start raining when the sun wasn't up yet. So...once it started pouring, I had put on my sunglasses in the pitch dark. Nice planning Anna!
As I ran through the darker dark, I tried my best to protect my ipod, but there really wasn't much that could be done because I was drenched to the bone after about 15 seconds of the rain. There was no tree coverage on the side of the road, so I stuffed it inside my already soaked shirt and hoped that I wasn't breaking my ipod for the second time.
The heavy rain came down for about the first 30 minutes of the race, and then settled into a sprinkle, which was quite pleasant despite the fact that my shoes weighed about 3 times their normal weight. And thankfully the sun started rising so I could actually see where I was going. So from about mile 3 to 7, I was content running through Aimeliik on the compact road. The route was smooth, there were relaxing rolling hills along the way, and the rain made for a cool sunrise.
But then we hit the halfway point, and we had to climb the K-B (Koror-Babeldaob) bridge, the "friendship bridge" funded by the Japanese in 2002.
It looks so picturesque right? Well it's also steep and painful, and after finishing it, we had to deal with a steady incline over the next 2 miles or so. That was particularly painful. About a mile and a half into the incline, I was ready to walk. But as luck would have it, I passed by a water station, and lo and behold, the President of Palau was standing there, cheering on the runners! I refused to look like a wimp in front of him, so I plugged on, and finally got into downtown Koror, where I was able to glide downhill for almost about 15 minutes and get some encouragement from Holly and Veronica, who'd woken up at about 4 am to man water stations. They even made me a sign!
The last mile or so of the race on Arakabesang involved 2 steep climbs and some powerful sunshine, but because I live on Arakabesang, I'd run the hills before and knew what to expect. And of course, finishing the race running along the beach looking out on the Pacific made me completely forget all those hills. Despite the rain, pain, and subsequent limping, I'd say that I'd do it again--not just for the t-shirt.
(Boom.)
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