Earlier this summer, I was fortunate to be able to travel to New York City a few times and even to be able to run in the city a little bit. Years ago, I ran the New York City Marathon. In July, I ran on the Brooklyn Bridge on a special memorable birthday run. I’d love to be able to run more in New York City, but virtual racing gives me a practical solution of being able to run with New Yorkers, NYRR, and virtual racers around the world. So from Lincoln, Nebraska, I can run with anyone else running a virtual race. I was excited to see the NYRR Virtual Halfway There 13.1M race opportunity surface and I jumped at the chance to participate!

Over the next few weeks (from September 7, 2019 until October 13, 2019, the last day), probably thousands of runners will participate in this virtual half-marathon race around the world. All you have to do to sign up is to create a New York Road Runners (NYRR) profile, a Strava profile (if you don’t have one already), and enter. The tracking goes through Strava so make sure you either use the Strava app or upload from Garmin/Apple after you run it so you get full credit.

A few weeks ago, I did the NYRR 5k world championship through Strava. That was a lot of fun and it was my first NYRR virtual race.

Training for a half-marathon in November, the Good Life Halfsy, running a half-marathon every month has been helpful in allowing me to remain in peak physical condition and to be able to try to track some progress over time. So the virtual NYRR Halfway There race is a good test run and training run helping me to align with my goals and stay on track.

Have you ever run a virtual race before? If not, here is your chance. If so, what did you think of it?

How can we create a course similar to New York? I guess the easiest way is to add bridges and pretend that they correspond to the Brooklyn Bridge, Verrazano Narrows, etc. It’s impossible to duplicate here but we do what we can.

Would you like to join us? Please consider it. Racing virtually halfway is fun for everyone. Grab your running shoes and let’s go!

Where will you run your Virtual Halfway race? We are running ours on the Rock Island Trail in Lincoln. Several of our Lincoln bridges might remind me of New York during the virtual race if I just use my imagination.