Notable Mistakes That I Made During My Half Marathon Today

Today I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon with 22,000 of my closest friends. I finished in 11,481st place, which is super weird because I really thought that I was in the lead as I was running it. Here are the biggest mistakes that I made leading up to the event and during the race, itself.

• First and foremost, I did not train. In the entire month of April, in fact, I only ran four miles total before the 13.1 that I ran today.

• Speaking of being unprepared, I was also really confused about the concept of carbo loading and what I should eat for dinner the night before a half marathon, so I somehow settled on eating Indian food last night— LOTS of Indian food.

• I brought my metro card which, of course, had insufficient funds to get me onto the Subway this morning so I had to hop the turnstile for the first time in my life. 

• At mile 5 of the race, I was bored and felt deceptively good so I, for some reason, called some of my friends on my phone and chatted with them about our respective weekends.

• Speaking of inopportune conversations, I tried starting a conversation with a fellow runner, which was almost immediately shut down by them.

• I asked a police officer who was munching on goldfish if I could have one, to which he emphatically said no.

• I choked on the water at every single hydration station because I did not know how to drink while running.

• After the race was over, I did not take one of the tin foil blanket things because I thought that they were strictly for clout and had no real function. This led me to be freezing cold five minutes later when the sweat evaporated off of my body.

• Overall, the race was an interesting experience and one that I look forward to never doing again.