Inaugural Clarksville Half Marathon Kandahar Shadow Race

I now have my fourth race in as many months under my belt, and today's was a good one! This time it was a shadow of the Clarksville (TN) Half Marathon. Clarksville is near Fort Campbell, KY (which actually straddles the KY/TN border), and someone deployed from there arranged for the shadow of the Clarksville race (story here.) Our finish times here will be recorded along with the runners in Clarksville, which is pretty cool. Anyway, back to the race... When I started training for PF Chang, I was hoping to finish the half in about 2 hours. Thanks to the ample training time here, I was able to finish today's race in 1:47:47! The bad news is that the Garmin has once again betrayed me, and let me know that the actual course distance was only 12.83 miles. I really need to stop wearing that thing for races and just accept that the course is measured accurately and that my finish time is whatever they say it is. Since I did wear it, I hate the thought of recording a 12.83 mile race, but I would feel dishonest recording my time as a half-marathon. I decided that the lesser of two lies would be to use the finish time calculator and record a time of 1:50:03 for 13.1 miles in my running log. The Garmin did give me some good news--my 10 mile split time was a full 4 minutes faster than my time for the Army 10 Miler just a month ago. I didn't expect to come this far this fast. I just hope I can keep it up when I get home. I'm definitely going to take advantage of this opportunity and start training for the full marathon. Good luck to everyone in your training, and I'll see you all in January--Steve