1:37.03

Mike finished his first half marathon, which is 13.1 miles, today in 1 hour 37 minutes and 3 seconds. He ran the Lincoln Half Marathon with 8,000 people and an additional 2,000 people who went on to run the full marathon.  It was a crazy experience for him, as the runner, and me, as a spectator, with that many people participating.

For as many events as I run, it was amazing to see how organized this event was considering the number of people running, let alone the volunteers along the course, and the timing of events.  It is also amazing that 10,000 are willing to run 13.1 or 26.2 miles.

Here is my perspective of the day (2 hours).

Mike actually saw a girl from Henderson in his same starting group so he was able to run the first half of the race with her.  (She was not the lady wrapped like a baked potato)

Mike decided to run with the 1:40 group(those planning to finish the race in 1 hour and 40 minutes), so he was lucky enough to be in the first wave of people to cross the start line.  When you have 10,000 running it takes a long time to start, so some people didn't even cross the start line until 30 minutes after the canon started. 

 When the race started the whole group started moving at once in the first wave of people, but when I walked farther back towards the slower groups, I saw long lines of runners waiting for the bathroom because they wouldn't start running for another 10-15 minutes as the large group in front of them filtered through the starting gate. 

 In a matter of seconds it was almost impossible to see Mike with thousands of people filling in behind him. 

 This is the group of people in the 8 minute mile group waiting to start. 

 People waiting for the crowd to move even though the race has already started. 

 10,000 runners is a lot of people. 

During the race I walked downtown to get something to drink to warmup.  Some people try to go to different points in the race to cheer on their runners, but I was worried that I would miss seeing Mike cross the finish line, so I headed straight to Memorial Stadium to wait for him to finish.  

 On the big screen, they had a camera view of runners entering Stadium Drive, when they were close to the finish, which was nice because I could see Mike a head of time and knew I wouldn't miss seeing him finish. 

 At this point in the race the crowd of runners was fairly thin, after about 20 minutes this stretch was at least twice as full as this. 

 Mike entering the stadium in the back to the right. 

 Finishing strong. 

 Crossing the finish line.  While the clock above Mike says 1:38.25 that is the time from when the canon went off, since Mike didn't cross the start line until almost a minute later, his time was fast than the time shown here.