13.1 miles/2:40:ish

The Portland Bridge Run is quite the event. I would recommend the 12K to anybody, but as things stand I don't think I'll be doing this half marathon again.

The scheduled start time was 7am, which was good and bad: the forecast was for a hot day, so an early start made sure it was at least comfortable to run in; but on the other hand I needed to get up really quite early in order to get down town and be fit to run!

The course started at the west end of the Morrison Bridge, went south to the Marquam Bridge, followed I-405 to the Fremont bridge, then took a long loop north - the loop being what differentiated the half marathon from the 12K. This was apparently the loop which would, in the Portland Marathon, take us all the way out to St John's Bridge but we turned back a way before that and headed south again. At the base of the north loop we rejoined the 12K course and crossed the Steel Bridge, finishing on Front Ave a little way further on.

The wrinkle for the half marathon was that you had to get to the start of the out and back loop by a certain time, or you would be directed to continue along the 12K course. The pace set for this cutoff time was not terribly challenging, requiring merely twelve minute miles, as long as all you were doing was running. But I wanted to take pictures. Half the point of this run for me was to whip out my camera on bridges that you can normally only traverse by car and take shots that you just can't get otherwise. And all of the interesting bridges were before the half marathon loop.

The result for me was that I ended up running harder than I really should have in the early part of the course so that I had enough of a time buffer to be able to take at least some of the pictures I wanted.

The race actually started at about 7:08. We all crowded onto the west end of the Morrison Bridge, jigging up and down, raring to go. I usually don't care about delays like this, but with the cutoff time I was getting a bit nervous. In the event, it seems they pushed the cutoff time back to compensate for the late start, but it was nerve wracking waiting for the gun.

What you don't really take in as a driver is just how steep some of the roads are that you drive every day. All of the freeway bridges in Portland loop up pretty high, and there's a real slope for a long way running up them. Even the I-405 loop that we ran along had a decent gradient to it, certainly more than you'd expect from just hurtling along it in the car.

Running over the first bridge, the Morrison Bridge that we actually started on, was quite a nice warm up. It was pretty crowded on there since the 5K runners were in the starting line-up. Then we turned to go up the OMSI slip road and up onto the Marquam Bridge. As I mentioned above, this is a pretty brutal hill to run up. Cars actually never go up this slope because in fact we were running against the direction traffic normally flows

Then it was a long trundle up I-405; that seemed to just go on forever, even though it can't have been more than a couple of miles. The turn off for the 5K wasn't marked, so a lot more people carried on when perhaps they hadn't meant to. This was also where we really started seeing a lot of bikes and began having to dodge through them all. Mixing runners and cyclists worked fine most of the time, just not when they were shuttling us from side to side.

The Fremont bridge was just glorious - it's a beautiful structure, and although it's still most definitely uphill it was much less steep than Marquam. I could really feel the wind tugging at my cap.

We ran through inner northeast Portland next, and there was the half marathon turnoff! Hurray! I think I was one of the last three or four runners who went this way - I only just made the cutoff.

The northward loop was quite nasty in and of itself - a long slow hill taking us past the Adidas campus and up towards the nicer parts of north Portland. There are some really pretty neighbourhoods up there. I remember thinking as I was going up this hill that firstly I was doing better than at Helvetia, but secondly that I would be coming down that hill soon!

The turnaround came about when I expected (unlike the one on the Helvetia course...) and running back down towards Portland was great. The long hill was fun to run back down: definitely enough to speed you up, but not enough to wear out the legs.

Somehow the last section after rejoining the 12K course, even though it was fairly gentle, was the toughest part of the run. I suppose it was all the miles I'd already done at that point! I hit a bit of a low point there, doing a little bit of run/walk (although probably more walk than run) and just struggled to keep going. I did finish though, so I'm happy.

My time was somewhere around the 2:40 mark, which is about ten minutes faster than Helvetia. I finished in much better shape this time though: I could still move my legs, and there are no surprising pulls or sore spots. I'm just tired.

Golly, but those bridges are steep.

Posted by Dunx at August 8, 2004 12:00 PM