It's called Big D Texas Half Marathon and is the third Half-Marathon race for my Four Seaons Half Marathon Challenge.

"What's your target this time?" My running buddy asked me last week.
"I will try doing better than I idid in the previous two races". And that's exactly what I have acomplished today. I finished the course in 1:53:30.

It was dark and raining at 6:30 when I left for the race this morning. I arrived at the parking area of the race site 40 minutes earlier. The rain was getting lighter then. Amazaingly the sun came out and showed his smiling face just two minutes before the start time. I thought that we would be running dry for the race. We started at 8 o'clock. I was after the 1:50 (1 hour 50 minutes) pace leader at the begining and gradullay the 1:50 sign was out of my sight. I did not try to catch up to it for I did not want to exhaust too early. At the 4 mile marker, my watch showed that I had used 34 minutes. That can be translated to a 8:30 pace (8 minutes 30 seconds per mile) . Not bad, I thought. What's nice was that we were then running along a beautiful lake for about a mile. At about mile six, I observed that the 1:50 pace leader stopped at a water station and lowered down the 1:50 sign when he left. It appeared that he had given up as a pace leader. About 7 miles into the running, the clouds once again showed their strength and were getting dark. It then started to rain and raindropps kept falling on my head for the rest of the course. Fortunately the wind was coorperative and was not blowing too hard as I could see the raindrops simply go straight down. In fact I felt refreshed runing in the rain though it's not as romantic as dancing in the rain. After mile 9, life was much easier for there were more downhillls than uphills. I was running strong until I reached the finish line. My stop watch showed 1:53:30 when I stopped it at the finish line. I hit the target! Of course, behind the number is many hours of training.

Every finisher was given a finisher's medal as shown below.

There are 689 Marathon finishers and 2042 Half-Marathon finishers in this event.

My next and last race for the challenge is called the Texas Hottest Half Marathon and will be held in August. Stay tuned.