Real David H.

I don’t know why I started calling my Shamrock Half Marathon recaps as “Sham Rocked whatever roman number it is,” but I did … and it makes it so much easier to find them when searching for them!

This race has meant so much to me over the years – it was my first all-out effort in a half marathon, I almost broke 1:40 in a race there once and it’s often served as a mini-family vacation.

After the 2015 race (Sham Rocked VIII), I said out loud that “Maybe I should take a break from this race” after my personal worst performance there.

“Most bad experiences have a lot of opportunities to learn something — I don’t know what I learned today,” is what I wrote.

Four-plus years later, I still don’t know what I learned that day.

But I returned …

In 2016 (Shamrock IX), my friend Travis and I had a much, much better experience despite some bad weather and I got what I later described a year later as getting some closure.

On March 17, 2017, I was officially done with the race, with the key words in my post of “for now.” I wrote “That race was closure as my friend Travis and I ran all but the final tenth of a mile together. I now believe that our experience together was the end of a strange chapter of my running life.”

The next chapter of running (or lack there of) was one I don’t care to rehash.

2018 passed with not missing it at all, but earlier this year I made a couple of social media posts that said “Shamrock 2020” sounded nice, but I still wasn’t ready to return to it … yet.

But it’s been on my mind so much this year. With the few price increase reminder emails that have popped in, I jokingly said I should sign up, but just couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. My focus, after all, needed to be on Blue Ridge.

Shamrock has messed up my training for Blue Ridge in the past – I focused on PRs for the race that I couldn’t recover well enough after to continue ramping up my training.

Now, though, everything really is different for me. I don’t care about a PR … I just want to have fun and embrace those moments again of race weekend at Virginia Beach in March.

So, yes, on March 21, 2020, I’ll be returning to the Shamrock Half Marathon for the 10th time …