I ran the Moody Gardens Holiday Half, and I have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it was a small race, very few people to dodge, and I had a great time running this half marathon, if only because I saw a definite improvement in my running and pacing. But on the other hand, there were some definite drawbacks.

First off, the race itself: it was held at Moody Gardens in Galveston, TX. The course was a two-loop course that went around the park and some surrounding roads. It was not, however, as scenic as I had hoped, but there were still some really pretty views of Galveston Bay that made it worth it. There were a couple of out and backs, too, and a lot of parking lot, which wasn’t very pretty at all.

The half marathon course had a ton of aid stations, like every mile, with water, Gatorade, and GU (the pre-race information said Hammer Gel, but that wasn’t the only thing they got wrong). That turned out to be both a positive and a negative, I suppose. It was positive because, if I hadn’t brought my giant FuelBelt water bottle with my own GU in the pocket, it would have been very convenient to stop and grab fuel or hydration. However, I did have my bottle, and I didn’t stop because the crazy wind would have blown water and Gatorade right into my face. And it was too cold to be running with water on my face.

It was a really windy day, too. At the 8 a.m. start time, the temperature was around 46 degrees, but the heavy winds meant a wind chill of 34 degrees. So basically I was running my first half marathon as a Texas resident in Massachusetts weather. That was… not so good. There were some serious headwinds, but there were also tailwinds, so it kind of balanced out.

So. We had the National Anthem in the giant ice rink tent to protect us from the wind, then got ready to race. Properly fueled, caffeinated, and hydrated, I lined up at the start, cued up my music, stuck in my Yurbuds, and got a satellite reading for my Garmin. I actually ended up pretty close to the front, which made me a little nervous. I had no reason to be nervous, though. We started, and I had some awesomely consistent splits: 8:20, 8:18, 8:30, 8:15, 8:12, 8:18, 8:12, 8:19, 8:13, 8:33, 8:15, 8:13, 8:10, and the last bit? 4:49.73.
Wait, what?
Pretty early on, I noticed that my Garmin was showing that the course was off. Like, first it was a quarter mile off, then by the end of the half marathon, it was an extra half mile. I had a chip time of 1:52:30, but I absolutely would have run a 1:48:30 had the course not been too long. I asked some other runners as we descended hungrily on the breakfast tacos and pizza, and they noticed it, too, so it wasn’t just me. Usually I end up foolishly adding an extra tenth of a mile or so by zigzagging through boneheads, but there weren’t boneheads. So it was the course, which was lacking the promised music and real-time results as well.