Nags Head is a thin strip of land located between the Atlantic Ocean and some sound. One of the big attractions for running a marathon here is that it's flat land. Aside from the sand dunes, not a hill in sight.

Except this entire part of the marathon.

Since I've got family in the area, I've spent more summers visiting Nag's Head than the local beaches. I had never seen hills in Nag's Head before. Well, during the marathon I found out that there are definitely hills in Nag's Head.

This part of the course had us running off road through a nature preserve. It was kinda nice going off road, but I didn't really care for the hills that much. Actually, that's only half true. I didn't care for the up hill parts.

This section got a little lonely. OBX is pretty cool, because they have people sponsor each mile marker. In the beginning on the race, people were actually out at the mile markers cheering us on. Not so out in the nature preserve. At most they just had signs saying who it was that ponied up the cash.

There were a few cool parts to this section. I really liked the shade. It was a warm day, so having a break from the sun was a really nice thing. I also liked the swamp feel to this part. The humidity wasn't too bad, so you get the cool atmosphere, and you can still breathe.

My favorite part of this section was near the end. The landscape transitioned from a swampish forest to more of a dune/forest landscape. I especially liked when the trail got narrow and it felt like we were running through the wilderness.