We were looking for a half marathon in Texas this last weekend, and there were two - the Texas Medclinic Leon Creek Greenway Half Marathon in San Antonio on Saturday, and the Tyler Rose Half Marathon on Sunday in Tyler, Texas. The Tyler Rose race definitely had a better medal, but it was twice as expensive and we would have had to spend the night before in Tyler - it's a 4 hour drive from Austin, probably more on a Saturday.

The Texas Medclinic half marathon is held on the Leon Creek Greenway, one of San Antonio's new linear hike-and-bike trails. These trails (Leon Creek Greenway, Salado Creek Greenway, Medina River Greenway) are all paved sidewalk trails. We'd hoped to be able to run on the side of the trail in the dirt to keep off the concrete, but that wasn't that possible on this race.

The course was pretty strange - the half marathoners started with the 5K runners (10K runners followed ten minutes later). Half marathoners did the 1.5 mile out and back that the 5K runners did, then went out and ran 10 more miles after hitting the start/finish. Only part of this was on the Leon Creek Greenway - there's only about 3 and a half miles of Greenway to work with, so the organizers added a strange collection of out and backs to the race. It wasn't confusing, but it wasn't particularly interesting either.

Seeing the nice singletrack side trails heading off the main path made me a little jealous of the mountain bikers who were taking advantage of the trails to do their thing on what turned out to be a pretty nice day.

We'd wanted to hold a ten-minute mile for the whole half marathon as a sustained tempo run - when we ran, we actually stuck right to the ten-minute/mile pace. Not too bad, considering that our real training for this had been two 10K races - the Country Roads 10K in San Marcos and the Race for the Fund 10K in San Antonio in the past three weeks. Of course, we'd also done the 8 hour Run From the Ducks, but the difference between the way we treat shorter distance races and ultramarathons is amazing.

After the race, the organizers had lots of breakfast tacos, Alamo Golden Ale, Coke, Diet Coke, and Honey Milk.

With the $45 entry fee, we got tech t-shirts and a little medal and the post race food, so it wasn't bad. The costs were probably lower because the entire race was away from traffic. This was a real low-key race, but not on our favorite surface.

A course suggestion for next year would be to make the half marathon two out and backs on just the paved path part of the Leon Creek Greenway, avoiding the abandoned road and the weird sidewalks in what I think was Bamberger Park.

We "recovered" after the race by hiking the Main Loop Trail (a stair-stepper) of Friedrich Wilderness Park, and then trying to keep up with the amazing Liza Howard and Amanda McIntosh at the tail end of their 12 hour track run for the Wounded Warriors. I don't think timed track runs are for me - the Run from the Ducks in the Botanical Gardens was much more fun than a track.