Earlier this year when registration for the Brooklyn Half Marathon was approaching, I reached out to my friends to see if anyone was interested in running the Brooklyn half with me - When Mike, Sophie and Carson all wanted in, we made sure we were at our computers right when registration opened, since this race always sells out fast! Luckily, the three of us got into the race, and made sure to get our miles in leading up to race day.
I’ve written about running with these three before, but I am going to take a moment to introduce them here -
Mike and I first met in 1998, when my family moved to Wantagh. Our younger brothers were on the same baseball team, and we were the reluctant older siblings that got dragged to every game. But we forged a friendship that lasted through our days of doing plays together in high school, and into adulthood. He is often encouraging and a co-conspirator in my running shenanigans.
Sophie and I met in 2013, after she started dating my younger brother in 2012. They’re still dating today, and the two of us are truly kindred spirits. She has become one of my closest friends since moving to Long Island last year. Sophie, Kasey and I spend a lot of time together in a group message and in person, and this was set to be her first half marathon - until she decided to run the Long Island Half two weeks before the Brooklyn Half. Unfortunately, she injured her foot at the LongIisland half, so we really just wanted to get to the finish line without additional damage for the Brooklyn Half.
Carson and I met through work - when I moved into a new role last year she was occupying an adjacent cubicle, and we struck up a friendship that lead to days at the gym after work. We don’t work for the same company anymore, but we still find each other for runs!
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let talk about the Brooklyn Half! This race happens on a Saturday, which means you have to pick up your bib in Brooklyn, on a week night. Lucky for me, Mike works in Brooklyn and was able to stop at the race expo on his way home one night. I have heard the expo is epic, and I hope to experience it one day, but it just wasn’t in the cards with my work schedule this time around.
On race day my husband, Dennis, had agreed to drop us off at the starting area. We picked up Mike and then Sophie, and Dad of course had to assemble us for a pre-race photo - Sophie and I look super prepared, right?
We hopped in the car and were on our way. I made sure to organize the bag I was planning on checking as we drove towards Brooklyn. After a very rainy month - I did five weekends in a row of racing, and 3/5 were pouring rain - it was nice to have good weather on race morning. Mike and I always joke that if he is signed up to run, it is going to rain, so when it was pouring during the run as one four miler, we made sure to shout to the skies “It always rains when Mike does races shorter than half marathons!”
Our shout to the skies seems to have worked, because there were nothing but blue skies that morning, and we had a easy ride into Brooklyn. Dennis headed home to go back to bed, and Mike, Sophie, and I headed to the start area. We were all starting in wave 2, so we tracked down the wave two bag check area. One thing I hadn’t considered was that I was going to have trouble checking a bag - my bib was for wave one, and the bag check area was completely separate, about a mile away. We decided to just cram my stuff between Sophie and Mike’s bags, and once we dropped them off we headed for the security line.
While we were milling about the bag check area Carson found us, and we all waited together to get through security. As we inched through the security line I managed to apply KT tape to Carson’s calf and to Sophie’s foot, which was harder than I expected while having to move forward a few feet every so often. This line took much longer than expected, and by the time we got though the metal detectors we only had 20 minutes or so to go before our wave was set to take off. The porter potty lines were long, but we realized that there were more in the corrals, so we decided to walk to the corral and hope for shorter lines. Finding our corral was easy, but finding the end of the porter potty line was significantly more challenging. It weaved through the corral, and we hopped onto the end, hopeful that we would make it to the front of the line before the corrals collapsed forward. Luckily, we all got our chance, and the corrals were just starting to inch forward when we finished up our business.
We moved forward towards the start line with the masses, all eating a Gu as we shuffled. We were excited and ready to get moving, as the day was warming up as the sun moved up in the sky. The shuffle quickly turned into a run when we crossed the start line, and in her excitement Carson briefly swapped from running to prancing.
We didn’t have any particular plan for pacing this race, beyond wanting to enjoy the miles - which I always find is a good approach. We ran the first two miles through the streets of Brooklyn, eventually getting to grand army plaza, where spectators lines the street. We chatted as the miles rolled by, and entered Prospect park around mile three. After running the Hot chocolate 15k in prospect park, we were very familiar with that scenery - but at least this time we only had to take on the hills there one time!
Sophie and I stuck together, with Mike and Carson slightly ahead of us for most of the race - most of the time when we hit a mile marker, I could hear Mike celebrating ahead of me, and when we stopped to walk aid stations, we often found Mike and Carson along the way, and all reunited for a few minutes. Sophie’s foot was hardly cooperating with her, but she did a great job of moving forward despite the pain.
There were musicians along the course, and even some people offering snacks - among the snacks were doughnuts, and possible the most amusing sideline snack I had ever seen at a race - someone holding a bag of lucky charms. In my excitement over seeing the lucky charms I of course grabbed a handful, before realizing I really did not want to eat them - but the good news was that Mike was ready for a snack!
Eventually Carson decided to push her pace as we closed in on the end of the race, and Mike fell back to run with me and Sophie. Mike is basically the mayor of New York through, and did find his cousin and a friend along the race course! His cousin was working, so we had some idea of where she would be, but we just happened to find his friend among runners!
As we approached Coney Island there was a bio freeze station, which was funny to run through, as it was full of people in jumpsuits and goggles, armed with spray bottles of bio freeze to spray onto runners - we ran in, pointed to a body part, and got some relief. Once we could see the cyclone in the distance, we knew that we were in the home stretch. We hit the boardwalk, and once we turned the corner we could see the finish line. Mike and I shout-sang to each other, as always, and Sophie looked like she wanted to kill us both for it.
We crossed the finish line, and just like that our race was complete, 13.1 miles later. We spotted Carson before we got to the metal rack, and all collected our metals together, and then walked to the bag check area. It was slow going, but it felt good to be done with the race. The temps had climbed as we ran, and it was nice to be cooling off.
There is an after party at the baseball stadium that is on Coney Island, which we walked through on our way to Nathans - which was our primary post-race goal. The Nathan’s location on Coney Island is the original of the chain, and was our primary motivation any time we had a tough moment during the race. Plus, Carson had never before had a Nathan’s hot dog so we had to make sure she got the full experience. The wait for Nathans was almost as long as our half marathon, and just as we were finally receiving our food - chili cheese dogs and cheese fries, of course - Dennis called to let us know he was right around the corner. We had time to witness Carson experience her first bite of Nathans, but then we had to find Dennis to head home, hot dogs and medals in tow.
I carried my GoPro along for the race, so if you’re looking for a more detailed race recap, check out my video below!