1st Race Post-Baby

Well it took me 16 months but I finally did it! I raced.... Never in my wildest pre-baby dreams did I imagine it would take me this long to get back in the saddle so to speak. I had originally planned to do Cycle to the Sun (35 mile road ride up Mt Heleakala on Maui) in August 07. Kai would have been 4 months old. This was the last race I completed before Kai was born so I thought it would be fitting to prove to myself that I could do it again, post-baby. 

Well, post-natal life had other plans for me. I had no idea how demanding a breast feeding schedule could be, how crushing the exhaustion from night feedings, every night, can be, or how limited my time with Greg would be. So I found that I had no interest in spending 4+ hours on my bike several times a week to prepare for that race. Thus, that post-baby ambition was never realized while I focused on the issues of the moment - teaching Kai how to nap well, cleaning up puke, sleeping myself whenever possible, cleaning up puke, stealing a little couple time every now and then, keeping in touch with friends, cleaning up puke, and keeping in touch with family to name a few. 

Well last weekend while we were hanging out at Great Brook Farm with Kai, we saw a poster advertising a 5 mile women's only trail race the following weekend. Seeing as trail running is my 3rd favorite way to work out (behind mt and road biking), I decided to sign up. Tropical storm Hanna rained down on us the night before but Sunday morning dawned sunny and humid and promised to be a hot, muddy day for racing. 

My whole philosophy and approach to racing is radically different now, post-baby. I am sure that a competitive, regimented athlete still exists inside me somewhere but she is sorta dormant right now. This dawned on me pre-race night while getting my stuff together when I realized that the only bananas in our house were green! Yikes! There was a day when I could not even have imagined doing a running race sans banana! Oh well, no banana...we do have chocolate! Yeah, chocolate, that'll have to do for my pre-race snack. That is about how planful I was about this race. 

Race morning I felt pretty calm. Somehow my stomach still knew I had signed up for a race and reminded me with a few episodes of EB. But once that passed and we arrived at Great Brook, I had very few race jitters. That was good b/c the race got started 15 minutes late. Greg and I were surprised, after all, isn't this the time pressured New England we've heard so much about???? We commented that it was starting to feel a little bit like we were on island time ;-)

For once in my life I stuck to my race strategy. I've always been pretty good about this for bike races but not for running races. I think b/c I've always struggled to place well in running events, despite good training and preparation (I'm missing the key ingredient - natural talent!), I often lose my head and run hard, expecting some kind of running legs transplant while out on the race course. As of yet, the body snatchers have not arrived and I slug the same pair of legs I started with over the finish line. 

With no expectations for a strong finish, no PR time requirements, and honestly no real sense of sureness that I could complete the race, I stuck to my race plan. It was pretty simple: run slow, run slow until you might, possibly feel like you could run a little less slow. That was it. 

As it turned out, I'm pretty good at running slow. I kept my head and managed not to care about who was passing me or what my pace was. It was pretty cool to see Greg and my little guy cheering for me along the way. Kai was perched in his backpack and his little face was a mixture of excitement and puzzlement as he watched the runners go by. Each time I saw him he would look at me and you knew he was wondering....where'ya goin' mom????

Despite my typical race tummy cramp, I actually did start to feel a little smoother and better as the race went on and got to a place where I was the one doing the passing. The course ran through hot sunny pastures, lovely, damp shaded forest, up and down rocky, rooty hills, through some twisty single track and finally through a creek (arrived just in time for the race, courtesy of Hanna), before a sprint to the finish. Seeing Greg and Kai was motivation enough for me to actually pass someone on the way to the finish line. I paid for it a little with some dry heaves as I walked through the finishers' shoot, but hey, I left what I had on the race course.....and I wouldn't want it to be any other way.