Michaela Cotton's Staging Area

I think this course was a little challenging (especially if this is your first race). There a good amount of hills (around miles 1-3 and then miles 8-10 & a BIG one at 12), BUT miles 4-6 were all downhill, which was really nice. But I do think it’s worth doing this race. There were tons of volunteers/locals cheering us on throughout the course (and offering tequila shots). The race swag was good (shirt AND hat), the expo was HUGE, and they had a wall with everyone’s name on it there. Also, they had a water stop at each mile, which I really appreciated.

I thought this was a great race; it was a good little tour of Nashville (so it was definitely a scenic course). I liked it and would recommend it. It was a little hilly, but not nearly as hilly as other races that I have done.

This was kind of on me for not doing proper research before hand, but I was shocked when the entire first half of the half marathon was rolling hills. It seemed that the race was deliberately designed to have as much incline as possible because I could see the street ahead of us going downhill but then we would turn and do more uphill (and this happened multiple times). It also got pretty warm, and I wish that the race had started at 7 a.m. instead of 9:45 a.m to help combat the warm weather. To the race’s credit, around miles 10-12 there was a good chunk of downhill. I do think that the volunteers were great, and the community was awesome cheering us on. But I would not do this race again, and I would not recommend it for a first-time half marathoner.

This course has some problems: (1) it is really narrow in some parts and sometimes I had to walk because there was no way I could get around people; (2) the course is, for the most part, really really boring because you spend 90% of it running in a street (between the parks). I really wish that we could have ran more so throughout the parks, but it didn’t feel long enough.