I was in Iceland for just over a week last month, and in true Chelle-style, I decided to find a race while we were there!

The only one happening while we were there was the Reykjavik Spring and Autumn Marathon. Thankfully, almost every marathon event has a half marathon tacked on to it as well. Good thing for me since there was no way I wanted to run a full! I was pretty excited to run this one because I had pictures of gorgeous vistas while running and I knew I would love the temperature since it would be somewhere in the range of 0-10C.

Sadly, I was so exhausted the morning of the race that I was very close to saying “forget it, I’m not doing it”. Our rented apartment in downtown Reykjavik was on a decently busy street (Laugavegur) and I hadn’t managed to fall asleep until after 4 am. The race was at 10, so I was up at 8 am to have breakfast and sort myself out. I felt absolutely wrecked. I was near tears I was feeling so awful. The only thing that kept me going was knowing that if I finished this, I could scratch off yet another country on my running list AND the fact that I had told sooo many people that I was doing this that I would’ve felt like such a chump to go back to Canada and told people I had bummed out of it. Never EVER underestimate the power of telling people your plans. Doesn’t matter if it’s fitness related, or something else – telling people you’re going to do something gives you a lot of mental power. I am absolutely convinced that is one of the only reasons I even got my butt out of bed that morning to run this damn half marathon.

We took the local bus out to the race start zone (David came with me), and I was nauseous the whole way there. I was even worried that I’d get 10k into the race and then just be like “nope, I’m done”. So suffice to say… I had no idea how this was going to go.

So how did it go? Well, not great. The weather was misty and rainy and there was a lot more uphill than I was expecting. It was so foggy/misty that there honestly wasn’t a ton to look at either. It was an awkward temperature that I didn’t really have the right clothes for it (that purple Lululemon thing you see was far too heavy and not rain repellent – and yet, had I not worn it, I would’ve frozen my butt off). I was slow and tired, but I just kept telling myself “just finish it. Just run at a pace where you don’t want to die, and just finish it”. One of my mantras in my head no matter what I’m doing is “just keep pushing” and it really helped me after the 18th and 19th kilometers.

I clocked in with a chip time that was easily my worst half marathon timing to date: 2 hours, 19 minutes and 49 seconds. Given my slow pace and exhaustion, I actually thought I’d be closer to 2.5 hours, so I’m happy I managed this in under 2:20! In hindsight, I’m really, REALLY happy I did this race, but my god… that morning was really rough.

We came back to the airbnb we’d rented, I took a decent photos of myself with my medal and then I promptly got back into bed and slept for another four hours. What a bizarre experience… get four hours of sleep, get up, run a half marathon, then go home and go right back to bed. Like a bad dream or something!

I have to say though… a huge thank you to the organizers of this race. It was a very small group for both the half and full (under 300 people total), but it was well organized and the water stations were well-manned and easy to access. When I asked one of the organizers about how to get the local bus back to central Reykjavik, he actually found someone who drove us instead. I usually prefer far larger groups for races since there’s more of an “epic” feeling to them, but the size of this race allotted us the comfort of a safe drive home in a warm vehicle with good company. I really can’t thank them enough!

And there’s the course above as tracked by my Garmin. It was a loopback course, so we covered the same ground twice. Thanks so much to Pétur Helgason and Torfi Leifsson for some of the photos in this post.

So there we have it! Five countries (Canada, USA, Austria, Czech Republic and now Iceland) on my completed race list, and hopefully many more to come.

Race Summary

• Finish Time: 2:19:49
• Pace: 6:37 per kilometer
• Overall placement: 199/221
• Gender placement (F): 71/85
• Category placement:  Not available