People will ask me about my upcoming races and when I tell them I’m going to West Virginia for a half marathon the first thing they usually mention is that WV is a hilly state. Well there must be at least one 21km loop that’s flat, apparently not: Course Map and Elevation.
In total the course climbs 79 meters and drops 75 meters. There are two main hills, from 1.5 miles to 3 miles you climb 100 feet and then from 10 miles to 11 miles you climb 50 feet. Which really doesn’t seem that bad now that I’ve written it out, the elevation map just looks really steep. From a couple of people who I’ve talked to that have been to the Parkersburg Half it is a challenging course and is quite slow.
Gillis and I are making the 7+ hour drive tomorrow, racing Saturday and then driving back later that day. It’s a little further than I’d like to drive at this point but it’s more of a pain to fly. The race is also very competitive which makes the travel seem worthwhile. There will be a slew of Kenyans and Ethiopians including Alene Reta who has won the race before and won the Around the Bay Road Race earlier this year. He also happens to be racing under a different name than the one he used when he was caught for cheating (drugs).
I put in two solid weeks of training where I ran 227 and 212 km and had good workouts (2 x week). The second week was supposed to be a little higher but my piriformis/glute-med was sore one day so I took the day off, got some ART and the next day it was quite better. It is still tight from time to time but it seems to be getting better.
You can either squish or stretch that elevation map to get two different perspectives of the same race course. You can also see two different sides of West Virginia in YouTube clips…
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