Earlier in the month I said that my only goal for the Carlsbad Half Marathon was to negative split. It’s the first time in my rather short race history that I don’t want to PR. Even for the Long Beach Marathon when I was entering a bit injured, I wanted to best my previous time.

This time around, [I think] I’m okay with just negative splitting. A PR seems a little out of reach considering my recent mileage is rather low and I’m still not one hundred percent okay with the IT band issues. In addition, since I’ve decided to run LA, this should be more of a training run.

Anyway… I’m more or less scared I can’t get back to the speedy-for-me pace that felt so easy at the Holiday Half.

We’ll see.

***

While I’m being a weenie about the race, I’ve been excited for this weekend. I signed up in November with some long time friends I met through blogging years ago. Back then we called our little blogging community Blogotitlán (or Blogtitlán). Although we weren’t all Latino and lived all over the country, we found that we had a lot in common and could relate to one another’s posts about everything from identity to our education. Through travel for school, I had the opportunity to meet people in NY, Chicago, Austin, and all over California. It’s been pretty cool.

I don’t know who came up with running Carlsbad. I think it was David’s (Oso) idea. He tagged some others in our little community who were in to running. Soon enough four of us were registered for the full or half. Sean decided to run as did my sister. Elena’s friend also registered. We all made plans to come in from Chicago, Columbus, Mexico City, LA and Bakersfield and rented a house for the weekend. A few others in the area said they didn’t want to run, but would come out to cheer. César was down to run and train for a race, but couldn’t make it out to California.

Seven years ago when I first met and got to know Elena, David, Alfonso, Adriana and Gustavo via the interwebs, I thought one day we’d all hang out (with some others in the informal crew too!). We even tried to plan a reunion but it fell through because I’m flaky like that. I didn’t think the reunion would finally happen on a race weekend.

Elena wrote a much better post on the reunion.